“Let us suppose that everyone in the world wakes up today and tries to Write a poem. It is impossible to know what will happen next but certainly we may be assured that the world will not be made Worse. I believe in the divinity of profligacy. The creation of art, okay, just the attempt at the creation of art, as well as the appreciation of it, is both an enlarging of the world and an expanding of consciousness. To write a poem is to explore the unknown capacities of the mind and the heart; it is emotive, empathetic exercise and, like being struck by lightning, it will probably leave you stunned, singed, but also a bit brighter, and too your odds of being struck again then go much higher. Sometimes when We feel disappointed with a poem, with our effort, feel that the poem fails us, it’s because it seems to fall short of our intentions. But those intentions are often vague and speculative, and any attempted actualization of those ideas can’t help but be anemia. Let us forgive ourselves for writing poems that aren’t better than every other poem that has ever been written. The nagging sense of failure may not be that the poem falls short but rather that the forms of intention are themselves at fault, producing a too-ready verdict of failure. Prescription may offer a kind of security; it presupposes, provides a certainty based on very little before engaging something that is not even there yet. No one knows how to write a poem. Congratulations!”

The above passage comes from Dean Young’s book The Art of Recklessness.

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