Insight 2nd Ed_Jack Foley

was wrong. I began to understand that there was a gap between what people say and reality. Sometimes, I would show my poems to people — English majors and individuals who were supposed to understand poetry, but they didn’t understand it. I don’t mind not being understood, but that experience told me something, too. It told me that I can’t rely on so-called experts in the field to understand my capabilities. Writing involves a mixture of intelligence and intuition; there are writers who may be intuitive but not really intelligent, and vice versa. I think the greatest writers allow these two qualities to dance together. Intuition has helped me, and if a reader makes a remark about a poem of mine and says they don’t like or understand it, I use intelligence to think about why and explain it to them. I will accept criticism from some people, but there are many from whom I will not, and this is very important. At every moment of my life when I’m doing the most creative thing, I am also being told by someone not to do it. That is how I have been able to get through the things that have happened in my life because I analyze a person’s motives for saying certain things or behaving a certain way. What are two key behaviors/personality traits that allow you to be effective in your role? When I write a poem, I have a strong sense of how it shouldsound.Theproblemwithspokenwordandslams is that they are influenced too much by the American notion of the individual. The word “individual” in Latin is individuus , which means not divided—one thing not divided. The idea is, when you can’t divide a thing any further, it’s individual. If I think about what is going on in my head, I am not undivided — I am as divided as I can possibly be. If I am interested in representing what is going on in my head – my view of the world – then I need to have more than one position. The individual is nothing but a frontman for a whole lot of things that may be going on. That position and understanding of the mind as multiple is something that has grown in the 20 th century. Recognizing that as a character trait is enormously important to me. The first time I really began to understand it was when I read Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” That “ Not all writers have the intelligence to match their intuition. Those traits together make a better writer than a lesser one. ” was the first time a poem hit me like a ton of bricks, and I immediately wrote my first poem, adhering as closely as I could to Gray’s poem because I wanted to get back to that state. Gray’s poem made me discover who I was, and poetic language helped me make this discovery. I think I was discovering language and what words really do. They can bring us into a state outside of our own. That discovery and my confidence are what have kept me afloat even during a time when nobody understood my poetry. I have had to rely on myself and the belief that the experience I had reading Gray’s poem when I was 15 years old was real. It changed me, and I have accessed that experience for the rest of my life. It taught me that the body and soul are not separate entities. Now nearing 80 years old, I still have access to that state of mind. Second Edition | Marquis Who ’ s Who Insight 9