Over at the Poetry Foundation website, CNQ Poetry Editor Carmine Starnino writes about how boredom is essential to creativity.
I’ve never had a good feeling about writing poetry. Unease set in early, when I was about seventeen, and, after two decades, the deed still doesn’t sit quite right. I’m a victim, I tell myself, of the southern Italian distrust of books. For the immigrants who docked in North America midcentury, education was something to be encouraged, but only as a means to a better-paying end (laborers wanted to sire lawyers, not artsy-fartsy layabouts). My parents were more tolerant than most, but there was obvious alarm that all my reading would leave me “mixed up.”
Then there was the language. Like most of the little Fonzies bred in Montreal north, I was raised almost entirely in Italian. This had an interesting effect on my English. In high school, for example, “skinned” was what you said if you came in close contact with something (“that car nearly skinned me”). If you had just stuffed your face, you used “shkoff” (“shkoffed a sangwich”). The weird sentences I spoke ensured that much of my university life would be spent in disguise. Hanging around silver-tongued creative writing students, I watched what I said and how I said it. I worked hard to suppress the accent in my voice, to better play the fit-to-be-in-literary-company part.
Today the verse hook is planted deep. And with it, the wound: that one of the central activities of my life is tinged with the sense of being dissolute, escapist, fey. Even at those rare moments when, fresh off a new poem, I feel the artisanal high of every word fitting flush, the crash comes swiftly: depression and anxiety at having gotten away with something slightly preposterous. I’m in it now for better or worse, but I’m always on the lookout for some clue that can help explain the emergence of the poet who bears my name.
For the rest of Carmine’s article, please go here:
Tags: Carmine Starnino, miscellaneous, Poetry