Inspiration, Biography, and Interpretation.

I have been thinking lately about where inspiration comes from and what that might mean. I never saw it as a problem before, but maybe it is…

Let me back up.

I was asked to come and read some of my poetry in a Creative Writing class recently. After I’d read some of the students naturally had questions about process. How do I come up with material? How do I decide what to write about? On the one hand, I can say I get ideas from the things and people around me. I have written a good deal of poetry about events that took place in my life. Admitting that, though, feels a bit dangerous because it opens one up to all kinds of biographical interpretations. I hope the poem stands alone and has enough universality (or inspires sufficient empathy) that anyone can be inside that poem for a moment and look through the poem’s eyes. Not my eyes. The poem’s eyes. Wherever it came from and whatever inspired it and whatever aspects of my life might be inside a given poem or story, I hope it never gets reduced to something “about me.” I think all literary art is independent of all literary artists, or at least that’s how I want it to be.

The other half of this line of thought comes out of a book I’m reading. A biography of Ernest Hemingway, in fact. So much of what he writes is critically interpreted according to his biography, and perhaps that approach does shed some light, but I think it’s a slippery slope. While Green Hills of Africa might well be a fictionalized account of Hemingway’s trip there, that information is entirely superfluous to the appreciation of that particular work of art as a work of art.

I wonder if it’s not better for us to focus less on the particulars of an author and more on the discrete and particular wholeness of each piece of art he produces.

That, at least, is how I would like people to read what I write.