Can A Writer Have Too Many Talents and Interests?

Many people in the arts have numerous talents and interests. In addition to writing, you might enjoy quilting, or playing an instrument, or you might be a good painter or dancer. In some ways it’s a blessing to enjoy numerous arts, in some ways it’s a problem.

In my early twenties I studied many different arts and crafts. I took classes and learned some skills from friends. I enrolled in a pottery class where I tried to master the skill of knowing how a glaze would look after it was fired. I sketched models from life endlessly, trying to perfect my technique with a charcoal crayon. I even had a business with my friend Flip tying macramé purses and chokers.

I was also writing and at the same time translating French poets during this period, but my role models were artists who did not specialize in one art. I admired William Blake, who created engravings to go with his poems, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite artist who wrote poems to accompany his paintings.

Rossetti's poem, "The Blessed Damozel," illustration by Kenneth Cox

Even though writing and literature excited me, like many people in the arts, I didn’t want to be strapped down to one discipline. In my case, this was partly because my father had been a widely published writer of short stories and reviews, and I didn’t want to be measured against the yardstick of his success.

At this time I was also taking classes in modern dance and ballet at the gym of my college, working at the barre in not weather with sweat gushing down my brow. (Some ballet teachers can be tougher than marine drill sergeants!). I was making pretty decent progress, and being the only male in most classes, I got a lot of attention.

Then one day, a new person entered the dance classes: Berat. He was an engineering student from Turkey, and he had never had much formal instruction in dance. Berat’s progress was amazing. He took every possible class he could fit into the schedule of his engineering studies, always arriving early or staying late to work in the mirror to check his form on the pliés. In a few months, Berat had surpassed all the other students. He was a natural. One day, Berat was gone. I asked the teacher what had happened to him. She said Berat had moved to New York, where he had auditioned for a dance company that was interested in hiring him, if he took a few more classes.

That made me pause. Yes, I was fairly good at modern dance, pottery, macramé, life drawing. But was I progressing at a pace that would allow me to make an original and professional contribution to the art, the kind of pace Berat had set? In every case, I had to answer no. Except possibly in writing.

Writing was the one art I was trying to avoid. But writing came naturally to me. I had to work at it, and work incredibly hard, but I was continually moving forward in my practice of the craft. I couldn’t say that about the other arts I was dabbling in. I was spreading myself thin, and as a result, nothing I was doing in any art or craft had much depth. 

I realized that I wanted to be an artist not just for fun—though it was great fun when it went well, more fun than anything else I’d done. I wanted to be an artist to make a contribution to the river of culture, and even if that contribution was only a few drops, I wanted it to be the best I could give. I saw that I would have to specialize to get good enough to make an original contribution that might have a chance of mattering to others, not just to myself and a few friends.

Even within the literary arts, a writer has to specialize. Yes, there are some authors who can write plays, poems, short stories, novels, libretti, and more. But not many. Most of us have to specialize in order to get good at a genre. Again, it’s partly what comes naturally, and partly what you want to work at. 

I don’t know if Berat ever became a professional dancer in New York. But I admire that he tried to make the grade, that he knew right away that dance was the discipline he needed to focus on. That type of single-minded focus doesn’t come easy to many creative people, who by nature like to experiment,. But that kind of focus often makes the difference between a dilettante and an artist.

  

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Praise and Lament, Part 6: Praise in Yehuda Amichai and Gerard Manley Hopkins

So, now we’re going to move from the valley of lament to the plateau of praise. In many ways, praise is the more difficult mode to write well. The great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai discusses this in his poem “The precision of pain and the blurriness of joy” from his book Open Closed Open, beautifully translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld.

Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000)

What Amichai describes so well in this poem is the way in which our psyches are hard-wired to record every detail of an unpleasant situation. This tendency may be a survival mechanism to keep us from repeating destructive experiences. But we humans are not well attuned to recounting the positive. That takes a different kind of attention.

Nevertheless, poems of praise are some of the most ancient in human culture. Many forms of writing or speech or song are traditionally vehicles of praise: psalms, hymns, odes, litanies, blasons (the blason is a form of love poetry that enunciates all of the beloved’s features one by one).

Just as the lament focuses on loss, on absence, the poem of praise focuses on presence. But the poem of praise is not concerned with something that is obviously present. It’s about drawing attention to something present that deserves or demands more of our attention.

One of the earliest forms of praise literature is the psalm. The Hebrew word for “psalms,” tehillim, literally mean “praises,” in this case, praises of God. Let’s say you wanted to write a poem praising God or the spiritual side of life and you wanted to do it using objects or things or creatures in the world that are the clearest manifestations of the divine. What would be the most obvious things to inspire a sense of spiritual awe? You might choose children’s innocence, sunsets, mountains, beautiful skies, rainbows, etc.—things that are self-evidently beautiful or pleasant.

Well, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a sort of modern psalm where he praises God through unusual objects or things in the world. Hopkins was a great poet and an Irish priest who lived from 1844 to 1899. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins

It’s very interesting what Hopkins chooses to single out as evidence of the divine. Here’s the poem:

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

What sorts of things does Hopkins choose to praise, and therefore to connect to the sacred in his poem? He doesn’t focus on days when the heavens are a clear blue, but on mottled skies. He praises not constancy and perfect complexions but what is “fickle, freckled.” He spotlights grungy, physical work: “gear and tackle and trim.” In what way are these manifestations of the divine, if God is, as he says, “past change”? Don’t these things seem like the opposite of the divine?

When I taught this poem in the low-residency MFA program at the University of Alaska Anchorage in the summer of 2015, my colleague, the poet Anne Caston, had an interesting interpretation of Hopkins’ choice of things to praise in this poem: “Hopkins understood something about the nature of God to accept the ‘flawed’ and ‘marred’ things in His creation. I love that notion too, that there is a part of the spiritual that sees the beauty and elegance of the ‘flawed’ things.”

One thing writers can take away from this poem is that praise needs to have an element of surprise. There’s a goody-goody side to praise that can be predictable and cloying. Avoid crystals, butterflies, waterfalls, sunsets, and cute babies, unless you can find something to praise in these things that you’ve never heard anyone laud before.

The artistic context of Hopkins’ poem is also interesting. Around the time that Hopkins wrote this poem, the United Kingdom and Ireland were in the midst of a serious medieval revival. You’ve probably heard of the Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and William Morris, for instance. 

The families of Pre-Raphaelite artists William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones

Influenced by the art critic John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites took their name from the idea of going back in art to the time before the Renaissance painter Raphael, whose work they felt represented a sophisticated corruption of the innocence, sincerity, and freshness of medieval art. During this period of the industrial revolution, in literature as well, there was a yearning for a more innocent and pure art. Many artists turned to or imagined a period when art was inspired by faith and the importance of craft. That’s why this school in the visual arts was also called the Arts and Crafts movement.

In his poetry, Hopkins harked back to the rhyme and alliteration of the very earliest English verse, dating back to the Middle Ages. This was the period of Old English, the Anglo-Saxon roots of English before the influence of French and Latin became predominant in the era of the Norman conquest. You can listen here to a recitation of one of the greatest poems of Old English, “The Seafarer,” so you can hear the alliteration and strong rhythms that characterized the literature in English in its earliest days.

By using the sort of alliteration and rhyme from an earlier period in the history of the English language, Hopkins evokes the faith and values of that period as well. But I think one of the take-aways from Hopkins’ poem is that the thing that you are praising—or lamenting—can shape the way you praise or lament it. It has to shape the way you praise or lament it.

Praise and Lament, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Gilding the Lily and Using Purple Prose

A lily is beautiful. Gold leaf is gorgeous. But a gilded lily is too much. That's why writers have used the phrase “gilding the lily” to describe language that is so ornate that it becomes gooey and insipid. In fiction or nonfiction, this type of language is sometimes called “purple prose.”

Here's an example:

Her hair that lay along her back
Was yellow like ripe corn.

Another:

“We two,” she said, “will seek the groves
Where the lady Mary is,
With her five handmaidens, whose names
Are five sweet symphonies,
Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen,
Margaret and Rosalys.”

These samples are taken from “The Blessed Damozel” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882). “The Blessed Damozel” is a poem he illustrated with a beautiful painting later in his life:

I admit it’s a little unfair to pick on this poem, since it was an amazing achievement for an eighteen-year-old, and it has some gorgeous passages. Still, Rosetti's Pre-Raphaelite verse is a good illustration of writers going too far.

When Rosetti describes the Blessed Damozel's hair as “yellow like ripe corn,” he could have used just one of the two descriptors and been just as vivid: like ripe corn. The two together just schmear gold paint all over the flower. I realize this poem is written in metered, iambic verse, and it has to scan, but still…

And the second selection, where Rosetti invents the names of the Virgin Mary's five handmaidens: Rosalys? Come on, Dante, give us a break. And lose the “sweet” in “sweet symphonies,” puh-leeze! Even the word “Damozel”—so precious!

I love Dante Gabriel Rosetti's Pre-Raphaelite paintings, but his language as a writer can be over the top.

Here's an excerpt from Danielle Steele's novel Toxic Bachelors :

“The sun was brilliant and hot, shining down on the deck of the motor yacht Blue Moon. She was 240 feet, eighty meters, of sleek, exquisite powerboat, remarkably designed.”

OK, Danielle, I wish I had one iota of your income from writing, but does the sun have to be “brilliant,” “hot,” and “shining”? I think we already know the sun is shining “down” on the boat, not up from underwater. And the powerboat is “sleek,” “exquisite,” and “remarkably designed”? Talk about repetition! That is deep purple prose.

What's the harm in gilding the lily and in using purple prose? It slows down the reader. It paints the details so thickly that the image loses sharpness. It's a matter of taste where to draw the line, but draw it we must.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms:  Introduction ;  The Sonnet ,  The Sestina ,  The Ghazal ,  The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer