My favorite poet is Rainer Maria Rilke.
This is important because I am a poet, and when you wrap your identity about something, then the person you most admire out of everyone else who shares that identity is bound to say a lot about who you are. I love Rilke, mostly because reading his work feels the same to me as sitting outside under a clear, starry sky, or wandering around aimlessly in a forest on a perfect, sunny day, or catching your first glimpse of a mountain peak after years on the plains. It captures something elemental, something you’ve always felt but never been able to express, something that has slept inside you waiting to be awakened in one quiet moment of reflection. He says things like “the One who will overcome you is working in silence” and “now you must go out into your heart as onto a vast plain, now the immense loneliness begins” and he ends poems with lines like “deep in the darkness is God…”, ellipsis included, and he calls God “you Limitless Now”, and i just can’t get enough.
Rilke wrote more than just poems, though. He wrote books, too, mostly collections of letters and things like that. He also maintained correspondence with young writers who wanted his advice. I think he must’ve been sortof a grandfatherly type, because he always seemed to have time and feeling enough to answer letters from people like that, when most people i think would just have been annoyed with all these teenagers sending them angst-ridden poems and asking for criticism, by which they really meant praise.
Anyway, his correspondence with one such person has been published under the title “Letters to a Young Poet.” I’ve read it, of course, because even though i like to think that had i shared time on this earth with Rilke i wouldn’t have pestered him with my amateurish poetry, really i know deep inside that i would have hungered just as much for a pat on the head from the master as anyone else out there, and dignity be hanged. Early on in this collection of letters, Rilke addresses the question of whether one should ever pursue the writing of poetry or not, in the following way:
“Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were ever denied you to write. This above all — ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I must”, then build your life according to this necessity; your life even to its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. Then draw near to Nature. Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose. Describe your sorrows and your desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty — describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it, blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches, for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place. And even if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses – would you not then still have your childhood, that precious kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? …A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. In this nature of its origin lies the judgement of it: there is no other. Therefore, my dear sir, i know of no other advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside.”
So there, in words not my own, is the purpose for this blog, this space, these writings. I am simply testing the deeps, flexing my muscles, collecting experiences, and writing just for the sake of words. As a good friend of mine once wrote, “I write to be”.
