Brian Friel, author of Dancing at Lughnasa, has died.
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His comment about the origin of certain kinds of writing is similar to what Don DeLillo said the other night at the New Yorker festival:
“That assassination [of JFK] was the thing that made me a novelist,” he said. “The power of it… I couldn’t come to terms with it.”
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Add A.R. Ammons:
[Poetry] comes from anxiety. That is to say, either the mind or the body is already rather highly charged and in need of some kind of expression, some way to crystallize and relieve the pressure. And it seems to me that if you’re in that condition and an idea, an insight, an association occurs to you, then that energy is released through the expression of that insight or idea, and after the poem is written, you feel a certain resolution and calmness. Well, I won’t say a “momentary stay against confusion” (Robert Frost’s phrase) but that’s what I mean. I think it comes from that. You know, [Harold] Bloom says somewhere that poetry is anxiety.