Without a sense of place the work is often reduced to a cry of voices in empty rooms, a literature of the self, at its best poetic music; at its worst a thin gruel of the ego.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.
A life without a lonely place, that is, without a quiet center, becomes destructive.
The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis, and those crises are often very intimate also.
Novelists in particular love to rhapsodize about the glory of the solitary mind; this is natural, because their job requires them to sit in a room by themselves for years on end. But for most of the rest of us, we think and remember socially.
Without the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, no literature.
I don't like to have a calm, orderly, quiet place to work. I often compose while driving, compose in my head. It is true that I wrote my little book, 'The Sounds of Poetry, A Brief Guide,' almost entirely in airplanes and airport departure lounges.
Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.
If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.
Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.
The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words.