welcome to eden

[cimorene]

for me the poetic act of creating a story is in a sense symbolic and deliberate. all art itself is by its existence about life as a continual struggle to create reality into art.

art is a chaos, but it is order too. it is assertion, the power to make anything mean anything else, to make those identifications palpably true to other people. the ideal function of the poet is to touch other people, the parts of them that recognize radical epiphanic meanings; the parts of them that grapple with the blinding raw stuff of reality, that constantly strive to build internally sensible things with it, as straight-walled castles with dry sand.


*the term 'poet' is used, in frye and here, to mean any writer of fiction; 'poetry' is literature; a 'poem' is a work of literature. you notice we have no particular, handy word for that.

Comments

[wolfsage.livejournal.com]

i agree.

it's a strange thing, making poetry (or literature). sometimes i think people do it mainly for themselves, because it gives you joy. but then i think maybe it gives you joy because you're doing it for others.... because what is a story that is written and tucked away for no one to read? not a real story, maybe... an imaginary story. yet to be written, if you want to use the word "written" in the sense that it is yet to be *shared* and therefore made into art.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

yeah. it gives me a lot of joy to create, and i don't think that that is entirely because i anticipate it making other people happy. maybe that's a totally separate thing. but i DO write for other people. i can't conceive of writing a story and *not* sharing it!

[wolfsage.livejournal.com]

i think it must be a seperate, though related, thing. because i also couldn't imagine not sharing something i'd written, even if it's just on the 'net. but writing it gives me a joy seperate from the one i get when i hear people have read and enjoyed what i've written.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

yeah. yeah.

i like the net more, i think. because money... sort of cheapens it, i think, plus i'm not so very confident of selling any given thing; and you get more feedback.

[wolfsage.livejournal.com]

that's very true. it definetely has some benefits, especially for a beginning writer. though, i wouldn't agree that money always cheapens it. i'd like to someday earn a living at writing, but i wouldn't be doing it *for* the money... the money is just what allows me to do *only* that. and i think it's very possible to remain loyal to artistic writing, you just have to be careful.... there is definetely a chance that you could end up writing things that are better monetarily but don't represent a new idea or anything like that.....

[cimness.livejournal.com]

i hope to earn a living at it too, but it's hard to define the sort of feeling i have about it. i do feel that it's more pure to just do it for love, no concern or possibility of money entering it.