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It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. all i can say is that i have always written poems. i don't think i'm interested in any discussion about whether i'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. but i am sure, i want to write great poems. i think every poet should want that.
-Clive James
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It's A Big Thing To Call Yourself

Clive James
It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. all i can say is that i have always written poems. i don't think i'm interested in any discussion about whether i'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. but i am sure, i want to write great poems. i think every poet should want that.
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Topic
Writing Thinking Want

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I can't stress enough how important it is to write bad songs. there's a lot of people who don't want to finish songs because they don't think they're any good. well they're not good enough. write it! i want you to write me the worst songs you could possible write me because you won't write bad songs. you're thinking they're bad so you don't have to finish it. that's what i really think it is. well it's all right. well, how do you know? it's not done!
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I had hardly begun to read i asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write
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You've probably heard about the theory of steam-engine time - that even after the steam engine had been invented, it had to wait until people were ready to make use of it. the same thing happens in literary circles. the truth is, i'm not terribly interested in victorian times; i'm interested in victorian writers. i'm interested in most eras of history, but not the victorian era especially. i was interested in the john franklin expedition. i was interested in these last five weird years of dickens' life. and i just have to take the age that comes with all that when i write about it.
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A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. the remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. it is better to write about other people's poetry.
Writing Successful People
What do you have in mind after you graduate?" what i always thought i had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over europe, and then i thought i'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. usually i had these plans on the tip of my tongue. "i don't really know," i heard myself say. i felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute i said it, i knew it was true.
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It is often asserted that discussion is only possible between people who have a common language and accept common basic assumptions. i think that this is a mistake. all that is needed is a readiness to learn from one's partner in the discussion, which includes a genuine wish to understand what he intends to say. if this readiness is there, the discussion wrighteous stupidityill be the more fruitful the more the partner's backgrounds differ.
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