Unlearning.

Unlearning

It has to be said: learning and dedication per se do not an artist make. There is the strange and eccentric, or unpredictable, quality of knack, or talent, or mysterious ability, that can make a breathtaking difference. Some have tried to take on, simply, the eccentricity and make that their artistic poster. But there have been poets, who defied (defined) both ends of the spectrum. Wallace Stevens was not eccentric (though he was an amazing walker), but his poems hold unexpected depths. Allen Ginsberg’s wonderful freedom and compassion were matched by a personal longstanding lack of confidence, and many of his poems, when stripped down, are quite sane. Both Ginsberg and Stevens were aware of the spiritual and philosophical area called “emptiness” but each approached it differently. In both cases, the path that would lead there was not “learning” it was “unlearning”—as in the Daoist sense of making yourself plain and not insisting on results.

There’s a realm that is both art and spirit, is both elusive and totally present—we are all “apprenticed to the same teacher, Reality” and this is not the teaching of any particular religion or school. It has working limits with birth at one end and death at the other, but not much more is known. Living in that, living with it, is probably what Lorca meant when be invoked duende—I think he must have read the Dao De Jing, too, which is a text about a Way that cannot be followed. But first, we must learn to follow the trail.

So learn to keep a sharp knife by, and some matches. And a notebook. And having cast a cold eye on a lot of your own work, then be available for a surprise visit, a big bird that grabs you by the shoulders and tosses you like a rag, and leaves you with the words and lines and rhythms that you didn’t have before. This is a way of saying that the poem forces its way into you but not so roughly that you can’t dodge it and forget it. But: you should open the door (even if it means stopping what else you might be doing). This is how good poems come—occasionally—to let you know you are really there. If you fail to recognize them, they’ll be gone and, after a few more tries, give up on you and go elsewhere. A little poem came to me, late in the evening, as I stepped beyond our Sierra high country campfire on a frosty fall night to see if what I heard was deer moving around. It became a poem for being available to poems:

How Poetry Comes to Me

It comes blundering over the

Boulders at night, it stays

Frightened outside the

Range of my campfire

I go to meet it at the

Edge of the light

I have kept up this exercise of “unlearning” and the study of East Asian literature and thought over the years. I offer what follows not as instruction or a model to follow, but simply as information about what some people (and some fine Chinese and Japanese poets and artists) have done.

Gary Snyder

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More on "remaining unprepared," here.