For whom are you writing?

Warning: This is not a commentary on what I’ve been reading for capstone (though I have finally gotten back into reading, honestly!). It’s thoughts about a poem. I still think it's relevant.

A couple of weeks ago, I sat down for lunch next to a girl I know and saw the book next to her lunch tray. It was a side-by-side Spanish and English edition of the poetry of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who lived in the last century. I’ve read a few of his poems in Spanish before, so I flipped through the book while I ate. When I left, I had the title written in my notebook and the name of a poem that I wanted to remember.

Of course, I promptly forgot about it.

Looking back at my notebook today, I found the words “Ode to Criticism” scrawled across the page. I reread the poem, and fell in love all over again.

In English, the poem begins:

I wrote five poems:

0ne was green,

another a round wheaten loaf,

the third was a house, abuilding,

the fourth a ring,

and the fifth was

brief as a lightning flash,

and as I wrote it, it branded my reason.

Note: Yes, that is supposed to say “abuilding,” not “a building.” There is no “real” English word for the Spanish word he uses.

He continues to tell how people took these poems and lived with them until the critics showed up, captured and tortured his poetry, and almost killed it because it wasn’t popular enough and lacked shadows. In the end, though,

They left,

all of them,

and then,

once again,

men and women

came to live

with my poetry […]

And now,

gentlemen, if you will excuse me

for interrupting this story

I’m telling,

I am leaving to live

forever

with simple people.

Wow. I left out a lot of detailed parts of his poem-story, but even just these parts made me think about how big and creative and magical and exciting writing is, whether it is poetry, essay, or my capstone genre of fiction. His descriptions of his poems at the beginning of the piece doesn’t even try to be a properly parallel list—he definitely is not in the comp teacher’s lap—but that inconsistency allows him to get all the closer to the heart of what his writing is. When we write, it can be anything at all, whether it is green, bread, or brief.

Even bigger, this magic doesn’t have to be some mysterious thing. Neruda writes a poem about writing for the common people—simple ones. If the narrator had written his poems in a way that would have pleased the critics, he would have lost his true audience. In this scenario, he has lost the approval of the critics, but they are the ones who kill his poetry, not the ones who live with it and can use it.

So whom are you writing to? What is excellence?

Is your work good because you got an A in class, made it into Inkstone? Will it be proven good later, when you’ve been published or accepted into a top grad school? Are you afraid it’s bad because none of the above has happened?

Let’s pretend that the excellence of writing depends on whether or not it meets its goals. In that case, yes, if the above are your goals, you are good or bad at writing depending on whether you succeed.

But maybe you’re writing to show hurting people that they are not alone.

Maybe you‘re writing to show people that some Christians DO understand how the world really works.

Maybe you’re writing to shine a light into a dark place.

If that’s true, take a point from Pablo Neruda—take your simple gifts to a simple people, and let them live with your words. Don’t stress too much about critics. Your poem, your story, is not for them.

Do you agree? Disagree? Do you have different goals or perhaps a defense of popular criticism?