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.
Those who teach by their doctrine must teach by their life, or else they pull down with one hand what they build up with the other.
In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education.
As a kid, I lived almost entirely inside books, and eventually the books started returning the favor. A lot of my internal world feels like an anthology, or a library. It's eclectic and disorganized, but I can browse in it, and that hugely shapes both what and how I write.
The essence of education is not to transfer knowledge; it is to guide the learning process, to put responsibility for study in the student's own hands...[and] place people on their own path of discovery and invention.
God has given to every one of us more than fourteen billion cells and connections in our brain. Now why would God give us such a complex organ system unless He expects us to use it?
If you can help a child, you don't have to spend years repairing an adult.
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