No Guarantees

“… how can you ever be sure / that what you write is really / any good at all …”

That’s the question pacifist, environmentalist, Buddhist, and former poet laureate W. S. Merwin asks in “Berryman,” a poem about his early teacher John Berryman. The answer:

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write

Strong words, but it helps to know that other poets, even the greats, live with uncertainty about their craft. Read the whole poem on The Writer’s Almanac.

....................................................................................................................................

In the Cards

Ideas for poems are everywhere, but sometimes I feel surrounded by an anti-poetry force field that’s keeping the ideas out. In a 2008 interview in The Paris Review, poet Kay Ryan tells of finding inspiration in a deck of tarot cards. She wasn’t interested in telling fortunes, but she liked the pictures:

… in the morning I’d turn one card over and whatever that card was I would write a poem about it. The card might be Love, or it might be Death. My game, or project, was to write as many poems as there were cards in the deck. But since I couldn’t control which cards came up, I’d write some over and over again and some I’d never see. That gave me range.

Ryan says the tarot helped her see she could write about anything. You can read the interview here.