Starting to catch up with the issues of London Review of Books that come through the door every fortnight, I reach that for September 10 and in a letter from an Anthony Paul in Amsterdam I find this terrific thought from the poet Paul Muldoon, from his Author’s Note to his Poems 1968-98, pursuing the logic of feeling that there is a mystery, or visitation, or transcendence, at the heart of poetic creation:
“I have made scarcely any changes in the texts of the poems, since I’m fairly certain that, after a shortish time, the person through whom a poem was written is no more entitled to make revisions than any other reader.”
I love that. Of course when it comes to poets who did feel free to revise their texts substantially, the first people who spring to mind are Wordsworth and Whitman; but when Muldoon calls himself “the person through whom” the poems were written, I think too of early Bob Dylan, saying as he did that he felt the early songs seemed to exist in the air and that he was just the person who wrote them down.
All this relates to a similar thing I’ve always believed about art: that since the artist can only know about the work done by the conscious part of his or her mind, and not about the undoubted contribution of the unconscious, the artist is no more an authority on the work than the rest of us, provided that we’re interested, receptive and attentive. This is why had I been writing a biography of Dylan, an interview might have been helpful but writing a book about Dylan’s work meant that I felt no need to try to interview him. People have often expressed surprise when I’ve explained this; Paul Muldoon would not have been surprised.
Taken from this post:
I LOVE THIS PAUL MULDOON QUOTE:
