When you're a student of poetry, you're lucky if you don't realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop.
Interpretation
Self-awareness can hinder progress; sometimes ignorance can fuel persistence.
This quote by Tony Hoagland reflects on the learning journey in poetry and the creative arts. It suggests that students may initially lack an awareness of their own limitations, which allows them to pursue their craft with enthusiasm and determination. As they improve, they might become more aware of their shortcomings, which could discourage them from continuing. The message highlights the importance of perspective in the learning process—sometimes, a lack of realization about one's talent or skills can be a blessing that motivates continued effort and exploration.
In practice
In a workshop on artistic development, discussing the importance of persistence despite self-doubt.
So much of what I love about poetry lies in the vast possibilities of voice, the spectacular range of idiosyncratic flavors that can be embedded in a particular human voice reporting from the field. One beautiful axis of voice is the one that runs between vulnerability and detachment, between 'It hurts to be alive' and 'I can see a million miles from here.' A good poetic voice can do both at once.
What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle. What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel. What I thought was an injustice turned out to be a color of the sky.
There is a whole industry in America of people who want to write, and those who teach it. Even if the students don't end up writing, what's good about them taking the courses is, they become great readers, learning to appreciate the writing.
The stuff that I learned on 'Sons,' the education of how to tell stories, was part of that mythology. It's hard to look at it and go, 'Oh, if I knew this, I would have done it this way,' because the fact is I like to think that all that sort of unraveled as it was supposed to.
The 'safe spaces' for minority students on university campuses are actually redemptive spaces for white students and administrators looking for innocence and empowerment.
The school has always been the most important means of transferring the wealth of tradition from one generation to the next. This applies today in an even higher degree than in former times, for through modern development of economic life, the family
Nothing would please us more than to see our beloved children form the habit of reading the Gospels - not merely from time to time, but every day.
I've got a 12-year-old grandson who, when he was 3 years old, before he could say many other words, could name the different kinds of dinosaurs.
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