I recently read a wonderful essay by Alan Shapiro, called “Why Write?” I have it in BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2006 (Houghton Mifflin, 2006); if you see a copy, grab it, many of the essays are great and I haven’t encountered a dud, yet.
But back to “Why Write?” I’ve glanced around teh internets but don’t see any links to it. I would like to post big swaths for your enjoyment, but instead will content myself with a few favorite paragraphs.
I remember thinking in my teens and early twenties that if I could only publish a poem in a magazine, any magazine, I’d feel fulfilled and validated and wildly happy. And then I got my first publication. And I was happy for a day or so, until the bill arrived for the printing cost , and then I thought if I could only get a poem into a real journal, into a magazine that pays, I’d feel validated and happy and when that happened, I began to feel the need to publish in the Atlantic Monthly or The New Yorker, a magazine that someone other than my fellow writers may have heard of, and eventually, when that happened, I believed that only publishing a book with a reputable press would make me feel as if I’d earned the right to call myself a poet. . . . and when that occurred, and it pleased me and the pleasure passed, I thought that only winning a big book award could quell this anxiety about my literary worth. . . . Anyway, eventually I did win a big award . . . and even then I found myself beset with all the same anxieties. . . . Don’t get me wrong. Acclaim of any kind is wonderful, except when it goes to someone else. But even at its best, that sort of ‘reward’ or ‘recognition’ is like cotton candy: it looks ample enough until you put it in your mouth; then it evaporates.
But I do think the more we refine our abilities, the more embarrassing our older work becomes. That is, if we’re truly lucky, we’ll despise our early work. . . . The problem is, the better we get at writing, the better we get at imagining getting even better. So the discrepancy between the writer one is and the writer one wants to be only widens as one improves. To flourish as an artist requires a tolerance for frustration, inadequacy, and a deepening sense of failure.
So why do it? Elizabeth Bishop provides a possible answer in a famous letter to Anne Stevenson. Bishop writes that what we want from great art is the same thing necessary for its creation, and that is a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration. We write, Bishop implies, for the same reason we read or look at paintings or listen to music: for the total immersion of the experience, the narrowing and intensification of focus to the right here, right now, the deep joy of bringing the entire soul to bear upon a single act of concentration. It is self-forgetful even if you are writing about the self, because you yourself have disappeared into the pleasure of making; your identity — the incessant, transient, noisy New York Stock Exchange of desires and commitments, ambitions, hopes, hates, appetites, and interests — has been obliterated by the rapture of complete attentiveness. In that extended moment, opposites cohere: the mind feels and the heart thinks, and receptivity’s a form of fierce activity. Quotidian distinctions between mind and body, self and other, space and time, dissolve.
