Go Read

Durs Grünbein's essay, "Why Live without Writing." This sentence will stay with me: "Someone [i.e., the poet] who is spared nothing in what he does, who has no protection and no aesthetic privilege, such a person will at least lay claim to his constitutionally guaranteed space, as part of a properly constituted minority." And this one: "You fill page after page, as Nietzsche once put it, with angry yearning, not to cozy up to your nearest, but out of love of those farthest away from you, and because the contemporary and the day-to-day will be all the more precious to you when you return to them in a wide arc over unknown terrain." One more: "Writing, the voice whispers to you, is the least circumstantial method of breaking out of the given and the immediate."

In some ways this essay is my best answer to the implicit question "What does it mean to succeed as a writer?" that I grapple with below.