( The name of the poet is not important, whereas his representation and the topics he talked about this evening are of great importance, for they can be easily translated to the wider population of contemporary poets, and thus need to be discussed )
Have you ever met an author who writes great poems, yet you can not say you like him and you feel something about him is bothering you, but you can not pin-point what? Well, that happened to me tonight. Luckily, I managed to figure out what bothered me about this author.
I absolutely hated that he was standing on a stage, for almost two hours, reading his older poems (even though the poetry night was organised in order to promote his new book), and then proceeded to analyzing them and talking about what he wanted to achieve with his poems, why he used those specific words etc. What bothered me about this was that he kept talking as if he is an excellent poet, who could measure up to Baudelaire or Prevert for example. The only thing I kept thinking of was that if he was that good, he wouldn't need to speak that much of his greatness, his poems would have spoken for him. I do not recall Baudelaire ever being that narcissistic.
What is more, poets or writers in general, should not analyze their own works, for they are the worst critics and the worst people to explain their own thoughts. All great poets have rarely discussed their works publicly, because you can not explain with ''regular words'' the meaning of your evergreen, timeless metaphors or rhymes. You can not back up a genius idea, with some simple explanation.
The only time a writer should explain his work, is only if he feels the need to show his readers a path they should follow in order to understand his work, he should never hand them the explanation himself, on a silver plate.
That is what makes a great author, a great author. Especially in prose, a genre in which you may easily be fooled to believe you have all the liberty in the world, yet you most certainly do not. Do you know how hard it is to express yourself in such a succinct and limited number of words? How hard it is to find the few words powerful enough to match the idea you are trying to convey? Even the writers like Prevert, who did not care much for the rules of punctuation and rhyming their verses, had to be extremely careful with the words they use.
You may know by now that I write poems myself. I dare say that my better works are written in my maternal language, which is Serbian, but I am doing my best to improve the way I express myself when it comes to writing poems in English. This post was not intended to offend anyone, it was meant to make us all stop and think for a second, about what makes a writer become an excellent writer, and what are the qualities of a good poet. Our society has allowed nowadays for numerous people to call themselves writers, which used to be such a powerful job reserved for only the few lucky ones who possessed the gift of breathtaking writing.
Note: no matter how lucrative nowadays it is to be a writer, you should remember that in the past, writers were not treated kindly, and often found themselves penniless as well as friend-and-family-less more often than you think. Now, we treat this occupation as if it is something anyone can become, which is complete nonsense dispersed by the capitalistic powers in order to make more money on best-selling authors, which if we stop to think about it for a second, do not actually deserve to be called best-selling authors.
Advice: be careful about the literature pieces you choose to spend your time on. In a world like ours, time may well be the most precious thing we have. Is it worth it to spend it on a book that talks about sex, money, fashion and dating, or a poem that has no originality, no soul, no hidden pain in it? Is it not more beautiful to reread Verlaine's :
''
Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l'automne
Blessent mon coeur
D'une langueur
Monotone
''
?The XX poet made many other mistakes tonight, but I shall not discuss them now. I hope he did not cause the same feelings with other members of the audience, his poetry is really not that bad, his behavior can only be destructive to the success of his work.
Also, another point for you to think about, as well as me, is something I mentioned previously. Can writing be considered a job? An ordinary job, like a being a teacher, or a doctor, or a lawyer? Can the talent of knowing how to write, be treated the same way as knowledge you can learn in order to become something other than a writer in your life?
I wish you all a relaxing end of the week,
With love,
Encantada.
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