Sign Up
Enter your name and email to receive updates on all Explorer Poet content
These words are not my own and I take no credit for them. I share them here as a resource for anyone seeking personal growth or as source material for their own creative expansion of the collective.
Andre Green, 1986, p. 322
The work of writing presupposes a wound and a loss, a work of mourning, of which the text is the transformation.
But peasants are a silent people, without a literary voice, nor do they write complaints or memoirs.
I dedicate this to all those who did not live to tell it. And may they please forgive me for not having seen it all nor remembered it all, for not having divined all of it.
Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead.
The poet becomes an instrument destined to give expression to those yet unformed ideas that lay dormant in our soul.
Poetry is a form of self-discovery as well as re-definition for both poet and her audience and that its refigured images can help assimilate into consciousness new definitions of the feminine.
An author should be understood, at least in part, against the backdrop of their times.
The writer who finds sensual pleasure in playing with words and ideas, and whose creations are your beloved children.
Writing this book has been like raising a deeply loved but impossibly challenging child. Birthed twenty-six years ago, it sprouted with promise until, like Peter Pan, it suddenly refused to keep growing. Two years ago, with no warning, it changed its mind.
Now let me dare to open wide the gate, Past which men’s steps have ever flinching trod.
There is a tremendous difference between intending to tell something and actually telling it.
The way I am and the way I write are a unity. All my ideas and all my endeavors are myself. Thus the ‘auto-biography’ is merely the dot on the I.
… the association of two (or more) apparently alien elements on a plane alien to both is the most potent ignition of poetry.
It has been writers and artists, rather than religious leaders, who have stepped into the vacuum and attempted to reacquaint us with the mythological wisdom of the past.
There is nothing new in the godless mythologies of contemporary novels, which grapple with many of the same intractable and elusive problems of the human condition as the ancient myths, and make us realise that — whatever the status of the gods — human beings are more than their material circumstances and that all have sacred, numinous value.
A powerful novel becomes part of the backdrop of our lives, long after we have laid the book aside. It is an exercise of make believe that, like yoga of a religious festival, breaks down barriers of space and time and extends our sympathies, so that we are able to empathise with other lives and sorrows, it teaches compassion, the ability to feel with others, And, like mythology, an important novel is transformative, If we allow it to do so, it can change us forever.
If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest. If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world.
Enter your name and email to receive updates on all Explorer Poet content