And so with poetry.
Eliot again (in “Little Gidding”):
“[…] You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.”
If poets looked at their craft the same way Eliot looked at prayer, we would read a lot less dross.
“There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, fluorish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives–unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle.”
I have spent most of my thinking life not liking Eliot, and now I wonder why. I suspect I will wonder for the next half of my thinking life.
“Carmen Bugan has the ability to transform deeply personal experiences into poetic language without losing the radiant particulars from which they sprang.” –Frank Beck
for full review, please see Vol. 18, No. 1 Fall/Winter 2017-2018
This is from Pablo Neruda’s Memoirs.
“The work of writers, I say, has much in common with the work of these Arctic fishermen. The writer has to look for the river, and if he finds it frozen over, he has to drill a hole in the ice. He must have a good deal of patience, weather the cold and the adverse criticism, stand up to ridicule, look for the deep water, cast the proper hook, and after all that work, he pulls out a tiny little fish. So he must fish again, facing the cold, the water, the critic, eventually landing a bigger fish, and another, and another.”
Dr. Carmen Bugan--Poet, Scholar, Teacher 