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    Writings on Writing
    Writings on Writing
    Writings on Writing
    Ebook89 pages1 hour

    Writings on Writing

    By May Sarton

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    About this ebook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateAug 18, 2015
    ISBN9781504017916
    Writings on Writing
    Author

    May Sarton

    May Sarton (1912–1995) was born on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first volume of poetry, Encounters in April, was published in 1937 and her first novel, The Single Hound, in 1938. Her novels A Shower of Summer Days, The Birth of a Grandfather, and Faithful Are the Wounds, as well as her poetry collection In Time Like Air, all received nominations for the National Book Award. An accomplished memoirist, Sarton came out as a lesbian in her 1965 book Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. Her memoir Journal of a Solitude (1973) was an account of her experiences as a female artist. Sarton spent her later years in York, Maine, living and writing by the sea. In her last memoir, Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year (1992), she shares her own personal thoughts on getting older. Her final poetry collection, Coming into Eighty, was published in 1994. Sarton died on July 16, 1995, in York, Maine.

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      Book preview

      Writings on Writing - May Sarton

      The School of Babylon

      This is the School of Babylon

      And at its hands we learn

      To walk into the furnaces

      And whistle as we burn.

      Thomas Blackburn

      I must warn you at once that I am not a critic, except of my own work, but perhaps I should not offer this fact as an apology for surely the great poet-critics of our time—Yeats, Valery, Eliot—have used what has been sometimes taken as dispassionate criticism of others as a means of orienting themselves and of grounding their own work in an aesthetic. Perhaps criticism from poets is always self-criticism.

      I should like to reconsider and shape once more some tentative answers to questions I have been asking myself for many, many years, questions about tension and equilibrium within the writing of poetry and within the poet’s life.

      Eugen Herrigel in a small but explosive book, Zen in the Art of Archery, speaks of the aim of the Zen masters as not the ability of the sportsman, which can be controlled, more or less, by bodily exercises, but an ability whose origin is to be sought in spiritual exercises and whose aim consists in hitting a spiritual goal, so that fundamentally the marksman aims at himself and may even succeed in hitting himself. So let me draw my bow and point the arrow inward …

      I have an idea that somewhere in his forties the poet reaches a turning point, at which he either becomes a more public or a more private person, that he has a choice, and on that choice depends the kind of work he will produce, as well as the kind of life he will live. In the dialogue between the world and himself, he fights to preserve the innocence and the intensity without which art cannot exist. And it is just when he is in his forties that the pressures to lecture, to review other men’s books, and to be a public person begin to assert themselves. My theme is tension in equilibrium, that dangerous tension, that perilous equilibrium which exist in every great poem, and in the life of every poet; and I have just touched on one of the permanent tensions, that between the public and the private person, the poet who lectures and the poet who writes the poems: they are opposite poles. Each of us seeks out his own solution to this never-solved problem. But I suspect, nevertheless, that the tension between the public and private self is not an unfruitful one. One of the fascinations of Yeats’ growth is that his assaults on the world, as a founder of the Abbey Theatre, and later as a senator, helped him to forge his style. Without the fierce tension between what he called The Mask and the Self, would he have hammered out the iron of his later style? Who knows?

      Tension … my Webster defines it in several ways. Here are three which I can appropriate: 1) A strained condition of relations, as between nations. 2) A device to produce a desired tension or pull, as in a loom. 3) Elec.: The quality in consequence of which an electric charge tends to discharge itself.

      As I pondered these provocative definitions, I jotted down some of the tensions I experience in the process of writing a poem, tensions which discharge a load of experience in a most beneficent and exciting way when the piece of weaving on the loom turns out to be a real poem:

      1) The tension between past and present,

      2) between idea and image,

      3) between music and meaning,

      4) between particular and universal,

      5) between creator and critic,

      6) between silence and words.

      Parallel with them are the tensions within daily life:

      1) between the living and the dead,

      2) between the public and the private person,

      3) between art and life.

      Once I had noted down these apparently organized but actually haphazard ideas, I took refuge at once in the equilibrium and organization of a poem, Thomas Blackburn’s The School of Babylon, from which I have borrowed the title of this essay. (The relief it was to rest in this momentary stay against confusion!) I might tell you that the epigraph of Blackburn’s poem is from Daniel, Men loose walking in the midst of fire (3:25). This is the second and final stanza:

      Although a wine-glass or a cup

      Can hold as little of the sea

      As you and I of our own selves,

      Pin-pointed by mortality,

      We still, that something of the whole,

      May quicken in the finite part,

      Must labour for a deeper breath

      And greater tension of the heart.

      Out of their windy distances

      The further energies draw near

      And kindling in our tongues and hands

      Increase the glory and the fear.

      But still as the unspoken word

      Swings slowly downward into speech

      And in becoming us reveals

      Another word beyond our reach,

      We praise the School of Babylon,

      For where else could we learn

      To walk into the furnaces

      And whistle as we burn?

      Of course, one of the springs of poetry is our strained relations with our own immediate past, the warring nations within the self; then the poem itself becomes a device by means of which this electric charge discharges itself. And one of the springs of poetry is joy—joy and grief as opposed to happiness and depression; the difference in intensity between the former and the latter is my point. In a formal sense, each poem also discharges and balances the tension between the whole past of poetic invention and itself; each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature. Those poets who wish to affirm their freedom from the past by pretending that all old forms are dead, deny themselves this fruitful tension. Their poems are intended to be wholly present, but we experience the present as a kind of equilibrium between past and future, and there is only tension, no balance between present and future. Such poems, like the children of Brave New World, are test-tube poems. I think that

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