This were my responses to someone who posted the following quote on Google+, which is better than facebook, by the way.
“We believe there are times when you are empty and times when you are full. When you’re full to overflowing, you write poems until you’re empty, then you wait around while you get filled up again.”
– Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, The Poet’s Companion
Nada Gordon – This is absolutely ridiculous and annoying. When you feel this way, just steal something.
Nada Gordon – I don’t think you could pay me to read that book!
Nada Gordon – The whole notion of “inspiration” posits a bourgeois Privileged Self with a Special Inside. To me it’s dopey and cloying. We make things out of enthusiasm, excitement, ambition, or some other sort of motivation, but “inspiration” is nonsense, as is the idea of “fullness” or emptiness,” as if we weren’t always permeable and therefore neither full nor empty. Besides, we didn’t make language, it moves through us, it came from outside to begin with, so the idea of being “empty” is just… fallacious. Just think about it, people! Don’t rely on worshoppy drivel-marketing for your consolation or guidelines. “The poet’s companion” MY ASS! If you want to make something, just f***ing assemble it. Addonizio and Laux are symptomatic of the ingrained simpering wrongthinking of “creative writers” who think their precious little epiphanies are Of Great Import. Angst anyway is not “emptiness” and neither is “joy.” Emotion may imbue/ exude from/ project onto a poem, or not, but it doesn’t make a poem. Will makes a poem. Selection and combination make poems, not emotions. I find the book, the post, the comments, the whole mindset utterly annoying. We can’t BUT “steal another person’s words” unless we use a zaum language no one else can understand. If you don’t know what zaum is, look it up instead of reading Addonizio and Laux.
Otohime 