Jackson's Actions

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire. --Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC) <

I couldn't sleep last night--too much excitement going on in my creative life--so I was watching Charlie Rose interview David Mamet, the brilliant playwright. In discussing his work, and (I loved that...) he referred to playwriting as writing poetry, he said something which brought me upright in bed--something so close to what I had just read in Louise Gluck's essays about creative process. I shall have to paraphrase to the best of my (faulty) memory:

Rose had asked Mamet if writing at his apex of success, was difficult. Mamet assured him it was more difficult because you get smarter as you get older. He said "Some have said that while the poet is struggling to finish a poem, he is failing, and after the poem is successfully completed, the poet dies."

Listen to what Gluck says (in "Education of the Poet"):

"That's my sense of the poem's beginning. What follows is a period of more concentrated work, so called because as long as one is working the thing itself is wrong or unfinished: a failure. Still this engagement is absorbing as nothing else I have ever in my life known. And then the poem is finished, and at that moment, instantly detached: it becomes what it was first perceived to be, a thing always in existence. No record exists of the poet's agency. And the poet, from that point, isn't a poet anymore, simply someone who wishes to be one."

And in "The Idea of Courage," she says:

"Critical assault of a finished work is painful in that it affirms present self-contempt. What it cannot do, either for good or ill, is wholly fuse, for the poet, the work and the self; the vulnerability of the poet to critical reception remains complicated by that fact. And the sting the poet may suffer differs from the risks of more immediate exposure: the ostensibly exposed self, the author, is, by the time of publication, out of range, out of existence, in fact.

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