Anxiety is love's greatest killer, because it is like the stranglehold of the drowning.
Anais NinRead
The poet is one who is able to keep the fresh vision of the child alive.
Interpretation
The poet maintains a childlike perspective that sees beauty and wonder in the world.
Anais Nin suggests that true poets possess the unique ability to perceive the world with the innocence and freshness characteristic of a child. This perspective allows them to capture the beauty and complexity of life in their work, making their art not only relatable but also deeply resonant with shared human experiences.
In practice
In a poetry reading, you could emphasize how poets see the world through a child's eyes, as articulated by Anais Nin.
Anxiety is love's greatest killer, because it is like the stranglehold of the drowning.
We celebrate peace. Yet we pay no attention to the ways of curing aggression in human beings. And when one sees in psychoanalysis hostility disappearing as people conquer their fears, one wonders if the cure is not there.
The impetus to grow and live intensely is so powerful in me I cannot resist it. I will work, I will love my husband, but I will fulfill myself.
We have been poisoned by fairy tales.
But I lie. I embellish. My words are not deep enough. They disguise, they conceal. I will not rest until I have told of my descent into a sensuality which was as dark, as magnificent, as wild, as my moments of mystic creation have been dazzling, ecstatic, exalted.
I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.
Often I listen to songs on repeat for days and days at a time. There's something hypnotic or meditative, and it mirrors the way that I am putting the sentence together, going back over the same phrases again and again.
Van Gogh never made a penny in his entire lifetime. He painted because it was his soul, his excitement. It was what aligned him with his Source of being. It's the same with me and writing.
While we cannot describe its appearance (the equivalent), we can define its function. When a photograph functions as an Equivalent we can say that at that moment, and for that person the photograph acts as a symbol or plays the role of a metaphor for something that is beyond the subject photographed.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.
For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.
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