I was in the library today, reading poetry . . .
—————-. . . when I was supposed to be writing prose.
I found a poem called “Berryman,” by W.S. Merwin.
Here’s the last seven lines . . .
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
In this age of desperate self-promotion, of tweets and status updates and high-cost book trailers, of authors being told, over and over again, about the importance of having a web presence, and — God help me, I’ve heard this — “the value of leveraging the media for maximum impact” — I am comforted by this quote, from one of the masters.
“Writers will be judged by what they write.” — Raymond Carver.
Taken from a terrific interview from the Paris Review, conducted by my most respected pal, Lewis Buzbee, with Mona Simpson.
