Under the Thumb
(Page 7 of 7)
September/October 1996
Margaret Atwood, This Magazine (www.THISmag.org)
This first book of poems was called The Circle Game. I designed the cover myself, using stick-on dots--we were very cost-effective in those days--and to everyone's surprise, especially mine, it won the Governor General's Award, which in Canada then was the big one to win. Literary prizes are a crapshoot, and I was lucky that year. I was back at Harvard by then, mopping up the uncompleted work for my doctorate--I never did finish it--and living with three roommates named Judy, Sue, and Karen. To collect the prize, I had to attend a ceremony at Government House in Ottawa, which meant dressups--and it was obvious to all of us, as we went through the two items in my wardrobe, that I had nothing to wear. Sue lent me her dress and earrings, Judy her shoes, and while I was away they all incinerated my clunky, rubber-soled Hush Puppies shoes, having decided that these did not go with my new, poetic image.
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This was an act of treachery, but they were right. I was now a recognized poet and had a thing or two to live up to. It took me a while to get the hair right, but I have finally settled down with a sort of modified Celtic look, which is about the only thing available to me short of baldness. I no longer feel I'll be dead by 30; now it's 60. I suppose these deadlines we set for ourselves are really a way of saying we appreciate time, and want to use all of it. I'm still writing, I'm still writing poetry, I still can't explain why, and I'm still running out of time.
Wordsworth was partly right when he said, 'Poets in their youth begin in gladness / But thereof comes in the end despondency and madness.' Except that sometimes poets skip the gladness and go straight to the despondency. Why is that? Part of it is the conditions under which poets work--giving all, receiving little in return from an age that by and large ignores them. Part of it is cultural expectation: 'The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,' says Shakespeare, and notice which comes first. My own theory is that poetry is composed with the melancholy side of the brain, and that if you do nothing but, you may find yourself going slowly down a long dark tunnel with no exit. I have avoided this by being ambidextrous: I write novels too.
I go for long periods of time without writing any poems. I don't know why this is: as the Canadian writer Margaret Laurence indicates in The Diviners, you don't know why you start, and you also don't know why you stop. But when I do find myself writing poetry again, it always has the surprise of that first unexpected and anonymous gift.
Reprinted form This Magazine, March/April 1996.
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