Certains se confient à une imagination toute ronde. Aller me suffit.
--René Char
Char's experiences cast this statement in a different light than I would like take it, but I still take it out of context anyway. In an odd way, it reminds me of a poem in which Giuseppe Ungaretti describes a word as an abyss excavated from one's self. To go is enough for me when writing. As an academic, I have to put training aside to do that. Write first, theorize second. Sounds simple, but whenever I write, I hear echoes of theorists and other poets. Heidegger and Wittgenstein often come up when I'm writing, along with Dante, Homer, and a host of others--not all are white males (on the anniversary of Brown, I cannot help thinking of that). I hardly ever think of fiction writers when writing poetry, even though I spend much of my time reading them. For example, currently I am rereading Italo Calvino's Il barone rampante for a "Green Studies" article that I am writing, but Calvino does not even emerge when I am thinking about writing poetry.
Char's experiences cast this statement in a different light than I would like take it, but I still take it out of context anyway. In an odd way, it reminds me of a poem in which Giuseppe Ungaretti describes a word as an abyss excavated from one's self. To go is enough for me when writing. As an academic, I have to put training aside to do that. Write first, theorize second. Sounds simple, but whenever I write, I hear echoes of theorists and other poets. Heidegger and Wittgenstein often come up when I'm writing, along with Dante, Homer, and a host of others--not all are white males (on the anniversary of Brown, I cannot help thinking of that). I hardly ever think of fiction writers when writing poetry, even though I spend much of my time reading them. For example, currently I am rereading Italo Calvino's Il barone rampante for a "Green Studies" article that I am writing, but Calvino does not even emerge when I am thinking about writing poetry.
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