Writings on Writing

May Sarton

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781504017916
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Scrittura creativa

May Sarton's lifetime of work as a poet, novelist, and essayist inform these illuminating reflections on the creative life
 
In "The Book of Babylon," May Sarton remarks that she is not a critic—except of her own work. The essay addresses questions that have haunted Sarton's own creative practice, such as the concept of "tension in equilibrium"—balancing past and present, idea and image. She also cites poems written by others to describe the joy of writing and how we must give ourselves over to becoming the instruments of our art.
 
"The Design of a Novel" is about fiction writing—where ideas come from, how theme and character determine plot, the mistakes many fledgling authors make, and how and why the novel differs from the poem. Further texts examine the act of composing verse, one's state of mind when writing poetry, the role of the unconscious, how revising is the loftiest form of creation, and how to keep growing as an artist. Throughout the collection, Sarton also warns about the dangers of trying to analyze the creative process too closely.
 
A book that doesn't separate art from the artist's life, Writings on Writing is filled with Sarton's trademark imagery and insights, letting us know we're in the hands of a master.

The Writing of a Poem

Several decades ago Charles Abbott at the University library in Buffalo began asking poets for their work sheets and built up an extraordinary collection. Since then other libraries have followed suit and it is now possible for students in many parts of the country to explore a poet’s mind at work, and to follow to its source what Marianne Moore has named “the feeling and precision, the humility, concentration and gusto” that must go into the writing of a poem.

But there is one thing that the work sheets on a single poem cannot show, and I must begin by speaking of it. I mean simply the state of being that precedes any writing. One might go so far as to say that the formal aspect of a poem, the craft aspect, is a game. The manipulation of certain words to make certain effects is a game not unlike a crossword puzzle or any other intellectual game with counters of one kind or another. What the work sheets show is the playing out of the game. What they cannot show is that, although poetry is a game, it is also a holy game; here, of course, it differs radically from the crossword puzzle. It is something more and something other than a purely intellectual amusement. In what does the “holiness” of the game of poetry consist? Is it not in the quality of the experience that precedes the writing? For the writing of poetry is first of all a way of life, and only secondarily a means of expression. It is a life discipline one might almost say, a discipline maintained in order to perfect the instrument of experiencing—the poet himself—so that he may learn to keep himself perfectly open and transparent, so that he may meet everything that comes his way with an innocent eye. How is he to achieve this extreme awareness and maintain it? Do you remember Thoreau saying, “To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?”

No one could be asked to be “quite awake” all the time, but it is what the poet must ask himself more of the time than most people ask it of themselves. He must learn to induce a state of awareness. I use the word “induce” here quite deliberately. The mystic induces a state of extreme awareness, the visionary state, by certain disciplines, fasting, prayer, and so on. The poet must create his own disciplines. I myself have found that a good deal more solitude and a good many more empty hours than are usual in our “busy” civilization are one of my own requirements. I have to induce the state of awareness by renouncing some pleasures, the pleasures of society for instance. When I am writing I cannot afford to be out late at night. If I do go to a dinner party, I know that the next morning the edge will be a fraction less sharp, the edge of awareness. I shall not be “quite awake.” What is inspiration, so-called, but the successful wooing of a state of mind?

And what is this state of mind? I can only speak for myself here. But for me it seems to be a floating suspension, above all the suspension of will: you cannot write a poem by wanting to write a poem, but only by becoming an instrument and that means not being knotted up to a purpose, but open to any accidental and fortuitous event. For this reasons trains and planes are very good places to lie in wait for poems. The telephone will not ring; and yet scenes float past, images well up; one can sit in a train and do nothing for hours without self-consciousness. So one autumn day I looked out of a train window at a tranquil bay, an absolutely flat pale blue ocean, and in the foreground a rowboat lifted very gently up on a long quiet wave. Just as we roared past I saw the wave break and ripple out on the lonely shore. The wave became for me the image of happiness, the shape of happiness. It became a poem. For what happens is that if the state of exceptional awareness is there, has been induced, this awareness will eventually collide with an object. The object may be something actually seen, seen with that peculiar intensity that acts like an explosion in the senses and through the mind, locking them together in a moment of “vision.” Or it may be an incident, a feeling, an intuition that wells up from the subconscious without volition, sometimes taking the form of a single line.

So one might define the poem as the result of a collision between a state of awareness, a delicate instrument for registering sensation, and an object. For most of us, love is such an “object”; Paul Valery has gone so far as to say that “all poems are love poems.” Conversely people in love become poets, if only for a few days or hours, because when one is in love one is “fully awake.” I am sure you have had the experience of walking along a street and looking at every tree and bush as if it were a miracle, as if no one had ever seen such a wonder before as that patch of sunlight on that pavement—because you were in love!

This is the exact state of mind of the poet when he is ready to receive the poem. We are all aware that this state has in it an element of mystery. We can come right up to the edge of the mystery, but we cannot wholly define it. Let us allow a poet to speak of it, W. B. Yeats in fact, in a little poem that defines perhaps as well as anyone could “the holiness of the game.”

My fiftieth year had come and gone,

I sat, a solitary man,

In a crowded London shop,

An open book and empty cup

On the marble table-top.

While on the street and shop I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed,

And twenty minutes more or less,

It seemed, so great my happiness,

That I was blessed and could bless.

Very young poets, you know, only wish to write about love. But as they grow older and more human, the range of experience which can excite them to the moment of inspiration widens, and this is one of the reasons why this art is such a great one. The demands it makes on intellect and the senses increase with age, and the excitement grows with age. We move, if we are worthy of our task, toward a purer innocence and a purer wisdom until at the very end we may attain what Coleridge has defined as the function of poetry, that state when the familiar is wonderful and the wonderful is familiar, and when the simplest object has seeds of revelation in it.

Simone Weil puts it, “Absolute attention is prayer.” The eye of the poet must give to the object this kind of attention. He is to see what he sees as if it had been just created, and he is to communicate it to us as if we had never seen it before. But if you look at almost anything, a rock, a tree, a lizard in this way, you learn something. The prayer is in the looking; the answer to the prayer is the poem which describes the object and also does something more, is something more than the object itself. Poetry one might say is the perpetual reincarnation of the spirit through a concrete image: “to see the world in a grain of sand.”

We are now approaching the moment when the worksheets begin. The poet is sitting on a train and has seen a wave rise and break on a lonely shore; he has had his moment of vision. He has felt deeply. He has been seized. He is in love, perhaps, or indignant, in a rage, more than usually excited. His state of mind is Miltonic:

I have some naked words that rove about

And loudly knock to have their passage out.

It is at this moment that something happens that forever divides the merely “poetic” person from the poet, the maker. For at this moment a transference takes place. What was high emotion is to be translated into a form, is to be “fashioned.” And the process of this fashioning has nothing to do with whatever it was that set the poet off like a firecracker. That explosion is now over. The moment when the writing of a poem begins is a moment of high excitement, but of an entirely different kind to the experiencing of its birth as an idea for a poem. The moment the poet sits down to write, takes out his pad and doodles, his feeling which was essential, is no longer the point at all. He has had it. Unless it has happened to him already there will be no poem. What is important now is that this feeling be communicated to someone else by means of a created poem. The “poetic” person never makes this transition. He hugs his “feeling” to him and imagines it is a poem. The transference from experiencing to creating is in part a transference from feeling to thinking, a conscious exploration and manipulation of what the subconscious brings. This means that from now on in the shaping of his poem, the poet becomes a critic. He must be capable of unremitting ruthless analysis.

Too much has been said about metre and not enough about what Jacques Maritain has called “the musical stir” that begins its rhythmic buzzing in the poet’s mind. And Maritain goes on to speak of “a meaning set free in a motion.” It is when one looks at metre from this point of view that its powerful magic becomes clear. For what the eventual definite metre in the poem must do is to awaken in the reader exactly the same sort of musical stir, and so move him. The musical stir, the form of the poem, is a spell.

What happens first? It has been my experience usually that a single line floats up into consciousness; is, if you will, “given”:

“The memory of swans come back to you in sleep.”

This line very often, not always, suggests the kind of musical stir the poem is to make, suggests the time, sometimes even the form.

It is just here that the amount of unconscious preparation the poet has been doing comes in. For now images must well up to be fashioned and these images will come from his subconscious mind. What has he been feeding it? What has he looked at, thought about, read, felt? Has he a passion for architecture? Has he been reading Traherne? Has he become lately fascinated by the Spenserian Stanza, or by a form such as the sestina? All this will be there now within his state of creative excitement. It is here that the general richness of the personality itself comes into play. In Robert Frost’s case, for instance, all that real knowledge of the country world, the crafts of chopping wood, pruning trees, is there to provide images. The foreground of the poem is the specific emotion or sight or thought with which the poem is concerned. But the background is all that you are, have thought, felt, seen all your life. The subconscious will be very active at the moment you sit down and begin to doodle. Some of what it brings you will be incongruous, weak, or silly and it is here that the conscious mind goes to work, selecting, sharpening, slowly coming to formulate as exactly as possible what the musical stir only suggested. The creative process is a continual alternation between what is given and what is made of the gift.

I believe that if one ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• The School of Babylon
• The Design of a Novel
• The Writing of a Poem
• Revision as Creation
• On Growth and Change
• A Biography of May Sarton
• Copyright Page