ZEDS Blog


I enjoy the essays of Dafoe, Addison, and Samuel
Johnson, all of which were published in pamphlets. Pamphlets were in vogue from 1650-1800, providing writers a forum to express views on politics, society, religion, and art. This has been revived in modern times in the form of blogs.

This is now a slight revamp of my blog that started in 2008.
My reading has become a little more specialized, although previous books commented on show I was heading this direction. At this point I will review mainly Christian texts or other texts from a Christian perspective. I intend to post more regularly with book reviews.

I consider reading and writing as part of the spiritual
journey toward maturity and, I hope, wisdom. These are postings of what I’m learning along the way.

Rod Zinkel, August 19, 2015


Monday, March 16, 2009

Writing What You Don't Know

On Novalis’ Aphorisms and Fragments
"Whoever describes nothing but his own experiences, his favorite objects, and cannot bring himself patiently to examine and depict even a totally unknown and uninteresting object will never achieve anything preeminent as an artist. The artist must be able and willing to describe everything."
German Romantic Criticism, p. 64.

I do not agree with Novalis’s statement about the subjective artist’s inability to achieve preeminence; I don’t know if Emily Dickinson ever wrote of anything outside of her experience. I highlight the statement, however, because it describes what I consider to be a matter of maturity for writers. Most amateur or young writers will write from personal experience. One of the most common precepts to writers is “Write what you know.” At some point, in the course of maturity, the writer must consider writing beyond his experience. (Unless he happens to live like Hemingway.) My own lesson on this came about, in part, by reading T.S. Eliot’s essays, and his “objective correlative” stuck with me ever since.

It is difficult to achieve, I think. When I consider my own poetry, the poems that are written of personal experience strike me as complete. Personal experience gives me a standard by which to judge if the poem is effective. I want to convey the emotion of that event, the significance of that event I am able to judge if the poem has the right proportions to convey that. Have I used the right language? Have I given too much detail? Have I the right distance from the event? Personal experience also helps me decide when the poem is finished, not unlike resolving problems in life.

When I write of events I have not experienced it is difficult to answer all of these questions. I wrote “Vulcan’s Tattoo Shop” without experience of tattoo shops or cancer. I still wonder if it’s right. The portion that describes the tattoo artist’s perspective I think is right, because tattoos went from personal strong statements to popular sayings applied like the Crackerjack stick-ons. That is observable enough from social trends. But I don’t know if the woman with cancer getting a tattoo of a pink ribbon has enough impact. I think my poetry tends towards resignation or stoic resolve because that is how I live. It would be farther outside myself to write on something like requited love.

This recognition reveals that nothing I write will be “totally unknown.” There is, at the core, the emotions I have experienced.

No comments:

Calendar

See the latest on Sheepshead Review, UWGB's Journal of the Arts:

www.uwgb.edu/sheepshead


Chapbook: Two Natures

The Neville Museum series has published a chapbook of 15 of my poems. They are of human and spiritual natures. Here are two poems from the book:

Two Natures

On still water of the pond
two natures you may notice--
where scum has been gathering,
there also grows the lotus.

One Way

There's a boy
who stands knee-high
to a July cornstalk.
He stares one way
down the dirt road
his mother has gone.
He find Fortune
has desrted him,
like the poverty-stricken,
society-forbidden parent.
"I can't take care of you," she said.
I am the child who mirrors
his mother's tears without knowing why?