I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild an want it back.
Mary OliverRead
I know the sag of the unfinished poem. And I know the release of the poem that is finished.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the emotional journey of creating art, highlighting both the struggle and the satisfaction in completing a work.
Mary Oliver's quote captures the essence of the creative process, acknowledging the feeling of burden that accompanies unfinished work and the profound sense of liberation that arrives with completion. It speaks to the dedication and commitment artists experience, as well as the joy that comes from bringing their vision to fruition.
In practice
A writer might use this quote during a workshop about overcoming creative blocks.
I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It's impossible not to remember wild an want it back.
At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all.
For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
If I have any lasting worth, it will be because I have tried to make people remember what the Earth is meant to look like.
Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.
The god of dirt came up to me many times and said so many wise and delectable things, I lay on the grass listening to his dog voice, frog voice; now, he said, and now, and never once mentioned forever from, One or Two Things
And you who wish to represent by words the form of man and all the aspects of his membrification, relinquish that idea. For the more minutely you describe the more you will confine the mind of the reader, and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the thing described. And so it is necessary to draw and to describe.
When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.
Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.
Failure and its accompanying misery is for the artist his most vital source of creative energy.
Sometimes my mistakes turn into interesting music because I do things that aren't supposed to be done.
Yves Saint Laurent is a young man of excellent taste; the more he copies me the more taste he displays.
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