Written on 12/08/2020 It’s a humbling thought, but I don’t suppose that any of my readers, much loved though you are, particularly noticed that I failed to publish a column last week. If you did, I thank you. If you didn’t, I surely understand. In these days of Covid, it’s damn hard to keep track Read More
Category: Columns
Nicholas James Whittington on Finding Time and Space to Visit that Place Called Poetry
What’s been most important to your writing: education, or the real world? Why?
I don’t see these things as separate. Education, both of the formal, institutionally-situated variety and the anarchic, autodidactic type, is very much part of my real world experience, and real world experience is just another kind of education. My writing relies on all of it. The way I see things, and the way I write about them are no doubt inflected by things I’ve read, whether in the classroom or on the couch, and the inverse is also true: that the way I understand things I’ve read is inflected by whatever all I’ve been through. That’s true with everybody. It’s a false dichotomy, and an unfortunate one. The classroom is as real a place as the barroom or the beach. There are different ways of being in each of them and different knowledges gleaned, but for me the poem is a place where that all is permitted to intermingle and interfere, “a place of first permission,” as Duncan has it.