I heard Malcolm Gladwell, the Canadian guru, on the BBC today, citing an idea from his new book on successful persons (though this idea has been kicking around for a while): namely, it takes 10,000 hours to master the skills of something, from football to math, to music - so, Mozart is not born, just given more time to practice. In poetry this explains hard-working Pound (or Yeats), but not quite young guns like Rimbaud, or Keats. Creative wrting, as a methodology, begins to make more sense when seen in such a context though - as the valuable space in which the mind can continue to do what it must for its art.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
Comments
I heard Gladwell interviewed on the CBC on this same topic. It was 10,000 hours or ten years, and surely we all put in that many hours between beginning to write and publishing our first book... it's an apprenticeship. I don't know about Rimbaud and Keats putting in the 10,000 hours, they are brilliant and geniuses and exceptions. I liked Gladwell's idea but I don't see it as supporting the creative writing industry, even if these courses force students to put in the time and hard work it takes to find a voice as a poet...
Thanks for your terrific blog.
Stephen Morrissey
I read this and on doing so, totted up the hours i have spent over the last 8 years writing, and thought there is something in it. I think it probably does take this amount of time to become expert in anything, and in the writing sphere, it is only in the last few months i feel i have mastered the art of mirroring within on the page. For example, when reading authors like Graves and Heaney prior to a few months back, i would be paying more attention to the words they write than to the puncuation marks.
I had Heaney as the bar of eloquence for critical prose, as i think he conveys the most humanly, his *own note*, and when i first read him four years ago, lagged well behind, as i simply had not the experience to either understand this crucial point, nor the skill experience leads to -- to express in a continuous train of thought, what we are thinking, unspoken, aurally within.
But when the eloquence had upped i noticed the double dash -- which in the states, is not seperated, as it is in the example here, but Heaney does -- and it was only once i noticed this in one of his prose pieces, i discovered its usefullness and only after becoming conscious of it, began noticing it in others, after using it myself--this way in America, unseperated.
10,000 hours with pen and pad, hours at the mic with live recital, digging for the seam of our own note within, i was lucky enough to develop these simultaeneously and now -- am boring like a good un, learning how to trust the first instinct, reach the simple state of tippin out and turning on a dime bro, re-arranging the vernacular as we go. One moment wheeze a cockney geezer droppin inta thay're, the next a yardie blood clot mon, B4 a yoof hoofin loik, loik, totally Amiri Baraka
wow wow wow
Wow ! Wow ! Wow !
makin lurve behind the mask of Segais inside, the source of Poetry our salmon of wisdom knew in the *unimprovable original* Minoan poetic Gravesy spent his life finding and bloating to incoherence in the White Goddess -- but the essence of his position, sound i think, especially if one takes into account how he posits the last outpost was druidic Ireland, and when one reads the text i have spent the last three years seiving through to poetic coherence, it is clear he was right.
And if we take Graves at face value and began our poetic education, not with Homer but Taliesin and Amergin, can right to a bright new note which has the gravity of truth about it, especially now a poet's education, few agree on what it entails.
For some it is cut ups, others making lists, but few connect to the one source uncorrupted since Homer and Hesiod. Indeed few understand how it is Hesiod's Theogony on which the whole of the short lived modern English language lyric Poetic rests -- the datums of a poets education, a make-it-up-as-you bluff type of carry on, poker for the intellectuals, where, if we just hit the right books, swam the broad stream logic suggests leads to somewhere that in the past, poets had as their source, the bardic course which takes only seven years before we can go public, get pro -- surely this is the way to go?
Seven years to be a poet, the same as any other respected profession, but poetry today is all prizes and network, who s/he knows rather than what reveals within, the moon-as-Muse-goddess, the silver, White one Bobby G goes on and on about, and after writing 140 books, being an expert ancient Greek and Roman translator, his rep in abeyance coz his brain was too comprehensive for the Si's and Cazzer Ann's of this ancient broad land to take on -- ripe for a re-evaluation by the ones who do still have brains devoted to the truth. Allt his dumbing down, i think is just a short pause before the big guns of the future start really gassing ina way which, may be ignored by the networking know alls, but in the long run, the frame is fixed, tilted towards - not the thicker poets - but the one's who know what *it* is: ie, not the one's devtoted to the exoterior show, but the Segais within know one even knows is *it*.
gra agus siochain