Quotes of Interest

"By sharing our solitude we come both to respect it and to create a door allows us to leave and return to the essential loneliness from which so much writing comes." -Murray, 7

This quote depicts what it actually feels like to me to write. There is definately a mindstate that I must be in to do any kind of writing. The mindstate necessary for essay writing is more easily created through environmental factors; I can go to Ravenwood or spread my things out on the couch and with coffee in hand, really get down to business. For creative writing, the mindstate comes much more sporadically and through certain emotional provokation that is less easily created synthetically. Regardless of if people are around or not, however, I must feel alone inside my head to be able to write the way i want to. I must be able to tune everyone else out, be it people in the room or the resounding chatter from conversations past that seems to lurk in my brain. That is when i feel true solitude and cane actually hear myself think. I can focus genuinely on what i'm trying to say and can more accurately say it how i think it should be said. When that mindstate is present, it is imprinted in the writing. I can easily tell by re-reading something i just wrote if i was distracted or not when i wrote it. When I'm not distracted my writing is more genuine and the reader can pick up on what i'm evoking. This clarity, to me, is essential in creating the bond between myself and whomever chooses to read what i've written. The bond itself is why i read (particularly poetry) and why i write.

"Writers do not tell new stories, they tell old stories in their own individual way." -Murray, 13

This is, essentially, why i read poetry. Not to sound melodramatic, but when i understand a poem and can relate to it, the bond i feel between myself and the writer (or speaker) of the poem creates a certain feeling of newness to the banality of humanity. For instance, there is a poem by Charles Bukowski that is beautiful to me, and certainly relatable to by almost all who read it. It is about the simple pleasure one derives from noticing at an attractive human being. In the poem, the speaker muses of his admiration for a cleaning lady's butt as she bends over to mop behind his kitchen table. That act in and of itself is so common and so familiar to so many people that it hardly seems poetic, especially since the subject of the poem may be offended. But the way it is written, with such honesty and simplicity, makes the act of quietly admiring another person seem like a beautiful token symbolic of a bond that all of humanity shares, no matter who, where, or when the reader is. That sense of connection and commonality, and the ability to give poetic newness and beauty to what innitially seems trite or even vulger is what i strive to achieve when i write.