Found the Rilke..'The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge'
Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) - they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neigbourhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents who you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for someone else-);to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars, -and it is still not enough to ba able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labour, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the window open and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves- only then can it happen that in some rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
I like that.
Sabelle, definitley agree it's not just practice, just as Hoddle and Greaves were born with gifts that separated them from the mortals so with writers (non-democractic usage of) or 'great writers' but of course Hod & greavesie had to practise and hone their footbll skills so with the writers and their skills.
I'm not sure where you're going with the music point, so I'll leave that one.
Back to the original debate, you can b a 'writer without being a great writer' but just as I would expect a footballer wothy of the name to be able to trap the ball with some dexteriy, to be able to run with it at some speed, to be able to pass the ball with accuracy over 10 yds etc maybe not all the attributes you would expect in one footballer, but a lot of them similarly with basic writing skills.
notice incidentally you cant get away in football, by simply kicking the ball anywhere, or picking up the ball and conceding a penalty, and saying i'm a footballer because i'm expresing myself, both highury and white hart lane would agree o that
I think that is the point.
Anyone can write, but it needs someone else to tell us whether we are any good. I kick a ball in a park but a footballer I ain't. Kasey Keller would agree with you about the penalty.
With the music I mean that there are different forms coming from one basic form just like writing. Sorry as a former music student I got carried away.
I suppose it's just like life, everyone has a talent for something, but some of us are just having trouble findng what the talent is. Btw I've just bought a book called the great divide - guess what it's about!!!!!
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