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.
When I was living in China, I learned to make things hyper-explicit because often they were being read by people whose command of English kept them from picking up what I thought were obvious signals.
Young screenwriters are always very frustrated when they talk to me. They say, 'How do we get to be a screenwriter?' I say, 'You know what you do? I'll tell you the secret, it's easy: Read 'Hamlet.' You know? Then read it again, and read it again, and read it until you understand it. Read 'King Lear,' and then read 'Othello.'
I went to college because I didn't have anywhere else to go and it was a fabulous hang. And while I was there I was exposed to this world that I didn't know was possible.
We run courses for government school teachers on Sundays. These teachers pay for their own food and stay; the kind of commitment you find in these people is remarkable.
Learning is never cumulative, it is a movement of knowing which has no beginning and no end.
The Museum is not meant either for the wanderer to see by accident or for the pilgrim to see with awe. It is meant for the mere slave of a routine of self- education to stuff himself with every sort of incongruous intellectual food in one indigestible meal.
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