transmissions

When you begin writing, you don’t know how to write. Presumably most of you have already begun, but it’s never too late to begin over. I mean it’s necessary to begin over constantly. And the best thing to do when you begin is to pick some poet whose poems you like, and imitate some. And then find other poets & other poems and imitate them. The worst thing you can do is to tell anyone who you are imitating. Because then everyone will think that all the good parts in your poems come out of being a good imitation. When, in fact, the exact opposite will be true. The good parts will come out of where you misunderstand entirely what the poet you are imitating is doing. & so write something that is completely dumb, but that turns out to be very good. Misunderstanding is one of the truly creative procedures in writing.

Ted Berrigan, from The Business of Writing Poetry

A year or so later, in Kyoto, I asked my teacher Oda Sesso Roshi, “Sometimes I write poetry. Is that all right?” He laughed and said, “It’s all right as long as it comes out of your true self.” He also said, “You know, poets have to play a lot, asobi.” That seemed an odd thing to say, because the word asobi has an implication of wandering the bars and pleasure quarters, the behavior of a decadent wastrel. I knew he didn’t mean that. For many years while doing Zen practice around Kyoto, I virtually quit writing poetry. It didn’t bother me. My thought was, Zen is serious, poetry is not serious. In any case, you have to be completely serious when you do Zen practice. So I tried to be serious and I didn’t write many poems. I studied with him for six years.

In 1966, just before Oda Roshi died, I had a talk with him in the hospital. I said, “Roshi! So it’s Zen is serious, poetry is not serious.” He said, “No, no—poetry is serious! Zen is not serious.” I had it all wrong! I don’t know if it was by accident or if it was a gift he gave me, but I started writing more, and maybe I did a little less sitting too. I think I had come to understand something about play: to be truly serious you have to play. That’s on the side of poetry, and of meditation, too. In fact, play is essential to everything we do—working on cars, cooking, raising children, running corporations—and poetry is nothing special. Language is no big deal. Mind is no big deal. Meaning or no-meaning, it’s perfectly okay. We take what’s given us, with gratitude.

Gary Snyder, from the introduction to Beneath a Single Moon

I think it’s important to be a good finder, because you have to train yourself, learn for yourself how to look. You have to intuit some sense of connection and determine for yourself what’s useful to the art of the poem. The art of finding is possibly more important than writing poetry right now.

“To be a good finder,” Dale Smith, in an interview with Kent Johnson