On Poetry: Hesitation, Definition & Celebration

I came across these meditations on poetry recently and just have to share them here for their wisdom and reeling truth value.

The first is a poem by Billy Collins which proves that even poets get the non-writing blues. 

We always hear of writers having writer's block, but not so much poets. So it's refreshing and comforting to know that they experience block from time to time! The poem, true to Collins' characteristic style, is witty, acerbic and entertaining, from the sombre start 'no act of writing has been committed this morning', 'and there on the couch am I, exploring/the vast continent of the ceiling' to the hilarious line about the verbs 'flying around the room in tights like a circus act.' How gleefully brilliant! 

There's a whole tone of cheekiness and light-heartedness to this poem, that seems to present block as a silly, maybe even over-hyped funny thing, and succeeds in taking the bite out of it. Well, I think so anyway. What comes across is Collins' innate love for words, which you can see in many other of his poems - I'm thinking of 'Thesaurus' and 'Winter Syntax'. A love for them as animated things, always mischievous and playful, and endlessly fascinating to him.

Paperwork ~ Billy Collins

Enough tea and cigarettes have been consumed here
but no act of writing has been committed this
   morning. 
No words have been hauled from the dictionary
like pails of saltwater brought up from the sea.  
The typewriter remains untouched on the table,
a strange, dark instrument whose secret purpose 
was buried long ago with its mad inventor. 

Outside, the high branches of winter trees
ban and clack together like canes in the wind,
and as usual, if you are quiet and listen hard,
you can hear the rhythm of human suffering
working steadily in the background. 

But indoors, things have come to a standstill. 
A thesaurus lies open by a curtainless window. 
Nearby is a vase of pens, a perfectly bound notebook,
and there on the couch am I, exploring
the vast continent of the ceiling, hands
behind head in the first position of idleness.

I am waiting for a sentence to appear,  
for a small thought to try on a jacket of language, 
for a syllable to step lightly onto my tongue. 
Until then I can only thumb through the Oxford
Anthology of Regrettable Verse or look something up
in the Cambridge Companion to Insincerity. 

Later, when the light softens into evening violet,
I may compose an experimental novel in my sleep, 
or have a vision of all the verbs in English 
flying around the room in tights like a circus act. 

Or I may dream again of encountering that ancient
   noun
who lives alone in a forest in the middle of a book.
My eyes will be wide with amazement as we sit down 
on a roadside bench and he begins to recount
his etymology - the long, sad, wondrous story of his
   life.  

Next up is something more excitable. After you've overcome your block you of course can't help but feel revel in the rapture of it all when the Muse is in and words are free-flowing and the world seems suffused in its golden glow, making all things effervescent and inspiration-full! 

How would you define poetry now?!

I've heard many lovely and eloquent definitions of what poetry is, penned by poets duly smitten. I've seen a few of Carl Sandburg's definitions of poetry before but never suspected they came from an entire excerpt. Every one of these following definitions is ingenious in its originality and startling in its accuracy. I think what Carl Sandburg manages to do in this declaration of definitons is not just capture poetry in all its mysterious wonder, but also in all its escapades of fun and capabilities for amazement. Delight and enlightenment. Pretty spectacular really.

I can hardly pick a favourite; each holds its own wow-that's-it-for-sure! factor. Though I do feel a special affinity for no.10: 'Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air', but then can't resist poetry as a 'sequence of...moon wisps' and 'poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes,' not to mention the zany outrageousness of no. 19 and so  many others.  Electric, all of them. And you can't help but marvel at the mind that came up with them. Truly astounding. If you haven't read any of Sandburg's poems, I'd highly recommend them!  They're odes of delight and crazy, kooky, sentiments that prod at magic and wonder.

Definitions of Poetry - by Carl Sandburg:

1. Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths.

2. Poetry is an art practised with the terribly plastic material of human language.

3. Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, 'Listen!' and 'Did you see it' 'Did you hear it? What was it?'

4. Poetry is the tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes.

5. Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, cross-lights, and moon wisps.

6. Poetry is a puppet-show, where riders of skyrockets and divers of sea fathoms gossip about the sixth sense and the fourth dimension.

7. Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water.

8. Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for.

9. Poetry is an echo asking a shadow dancer to be a partner.

10. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air.

11. Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations.

12. Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.

13. Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.

14. Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration.

15. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.

16. Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

17. Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.

18. Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish.

19. Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring.

20. Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches.

21. Poetry is a sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog.

22. Poetry is a mock of a cry at finding a million dollars and a mock of a laugh at losing it.

23. Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.

24. Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.

25. Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.

26. Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night.

27. Poetry is a statement of a series of equations, with numbers and symbols changing like the changes of mirrors, pools, skies, the only never-changing sign being the sign of infinity.

28. Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes.

29. Poetry is a section of river-fog and moving boat-lights, delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, "Oh!" and another, "How?"

30. Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables.

31. Poetry is the arithmetic of the easiest way and the primrose path, matched up with foam-flanked horses, bloody knuckles, and bones, on the hard ways to the stars.

32. Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts.

33. Poetry is an enumeration of birds, bees, babies, butterflies, bugs, bambinos, babayagas, and bipeds, beating their way up bewildering bastions.

34. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.

35. Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters.

36. Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits.

37. Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematic of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.

38. Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words.

A hard act to follow these delightful darings, but  I'll end now with a poem I've posted here before, but cannot reiterate enough for its flare of feeling. 

Pablo Neruda's simply titled 'Poetry' is a reeling celebration of what poetry meant to him. I have a copy of this stuck into one of my notebooks but resolve now to read it as often as I can. For it's proof of the magic that  lies within poetry.  A true testament to its power and ability to transform - 'drunk with the great starry void...I wheeled with the stars/my heart broke loose on the wind.'  Yes.




Poetry ~ Pablo Neruda

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind. 

There!  I hope these thoughts will inspire you as they have me. Poetry is a marvellous magic thing, the highest mode of appreciation and realisation of the world, a means of celebration, an initiation into wonder. 

For those of you it has touched, you know what I mean. And for those it hasn't, well, it will yet, in some way, if you want it to,  if you give it the chance. As Flaubert said, "There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it”. There isn't. Watch and see.

For now,

 
~ Siobhán

 

May Day Bouquet: Flowers in Words

 

Well it's May already, official flowering month! May of course comes from the word 'Maia', the name of an ancient Roman goddess of flowers and growth. 

Because I love flowers so, and like Monet, must have them, 'always and always!  my  Poem a Day blog this month will host many poems on flowers in keeping with the general theme of May.  And here I thought I'll follow suit seeing as it is May Day and present you with a bouquet of words to describe the beauty of flowers from famous fans, among them artists, writers, poets and general commentators. 

I often think of Iris Murdoch's quote about how people from another planet would wonder at flowers and why we are not 'mad with joy' at the sight of them all the time. Everytime I think of it, it just ups my flower euphoria another few gradients. Isn't it so spectacularly true???! Imagine spending time in a bleak desert terrain and then being transposed to a park in spring?! Not an oasis, but paradise itself! And of course Buddha's remark resonates with this - if only we could see a single flower most clearly, the whole world would change and we would reel in its wonder. Maybe if we could just sit and contemplate a flower for a moment, we could start.

Just being in the presence of flowers makes me happy. They lift the spirits like nothing else. They can brighten a room, but also a heart. They are so simple, yet so sublime at the same time. Not mere footnotes to our daily routines, but fanfares of delight, is we just be aware. There for the delighting. I love looking at them and I love to buy them. Not on special occasions, but on ordinary unmarked ones, indeed, to make them special. I think that there's no more tender or beautiful gesture in this materialistic world of ours than to give flowers to someone, not just on a romantic note (which has become sadly clichéd and tarnished), but any kind of note: a thank you, a get well, happy birthday, but most especially just a 'hi, how are you, have a nice day' thinking-of-you, heres-a-little-bit-of-beauty bouquet. If only it were a practice more ingrained in our society! Think how much happiness it would spread.  

If you're not a fan of flowers then maybe these words will persuade you otherwise and open your heart, like petals unfolding, to the beauty of them. And if you are a fan, you'll enjoy these immensely I'm sure. 

Here's to a flowering May!

~ Siobhán 

 'I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers'.

'I must have flowers, always, and always.' ~ Claude Monet

 

 'If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole world would change.' ~ Buddha

  'If you've never been thrilled to the very edges of your soul by a flower in spring bloom, maybe your soul has never been in bloom.' ~Terri Guillemets

 'Flowers... are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.'  ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

  'The Earth laughs in flowers.' ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

'The artist is the confidant of nature, flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms. Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs towards him.' ~Auguste Rodin

 

 'When you have only two pennies left in the world, buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other.' ~ Chinese Proverb

'The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.' 

 ~Basho

     

'People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.' ~Iris Murdoch

'since the thing perhaps is
to eat flowers and not to be afraid'
  ~ E.E. Cummings 

 'I would rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.' ~ Anais Nin 

 'It is by believing in roses that one brings them to bloom.' ~ French Proverb

What this old world needs is more bouquets handed around to folks when they are alive and kicking. Flowers don't do a dead one much good.

ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALE

Read more at http://www.notable-quotes.com/f/flowers_quotes.html#LZgkLjlkHPt6K6oX.99

What this old world needs is more bouquets handed around to folks when they are alive and kicking. Flowers don't do a dead one much good.

ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALE

Read more at http://www.notable-quotes.com/f/flowers_quotes.html#LZgkLjlkHPt6K6oX.99

'What this old world needs is more bouquets handed around to folks when they are alive and kicking. Flowers don't do a dead one much good.' ~ Robert Elliott Gonzales

 'There are always flowers for those who want to see them.' - Henri Matisse

  'Where flowers bloom so does hope'. - Lady Bird Johnson

'Flowers are love's truest language.' ~Park Benjamin

 

 

 'Flowers always make people better, happier, and more helpful; they are sunshine, food and medicine to the mind.'
  ~ Luther Burbank

  

Savage Chickens

 

Have you come across the Savage Chickens yet? Created by Doug Savage, they're wry chicken cartoons doodled (- tempted there to write noodle...) on yellow post-it notes. Among the topics they cover are poetry and writing, with a special spotlight on Shakespeare.

You read so many serious things about writing on the Internet - advice, rules, regulations, get-in-shape mantras, mottos, that it's nice to find some light-hearted relief once in a while. And that they are.

Here are a few examples to cheer up your Monday! You simply must check out the blog itself here: Savage Chickens. Good for a chuckle.

Enjoy!

~ Siobhán

 

 

 

 

April is the Loveliest Month

Are you enjoying April so far? 'April is the cruellest month...' TS Eliot once said. But I disagree! I happen to think it's the loveliest. And I'm not alone in this opinion either. 

April is quite the beloved month in literature. So many writers have declared their fondness for it throughout the years, from Shakespeare to EE Cummings (*see quotes below.) Just google it and see the plethora of material that comes up. No other month is quite as written about, or, as lovingly written about, as April. Its mention in verse appears as a warm rosy glow, a love-light, a fresh hope, a promise, a horizon, a time of abundance and growth.

April is a muse for songwriters too. 'April in Paris' anyone? Or how about some 'April Love'? Queen's 'April Lady'? Or Simon and Garfunkel's 'April Come She Will'? Maybe it's because April is the first sign of spring in the year, 'well-apparel'd April', the first real benevolent month, an anticipated and welcome respite after winter's weary wreckage, the first time we start to feel love again for the outdoors, that makes it such a potent symbol and metaphor for the heart's new season.  

April's popularity is also evident in it being a popular girl's name, what with all those instant connotations of spring.  The month takes its name from the Latin verb 'aperire' which means 'to open', as in bud, from all the budding and blooming that was happening at this time of year.  Originally April was the second month of the year in the Roman calender and named also after the goddess of love, Aphrodite, (Aprillis in ancient Rome). No wonder it has such a nice ring to it. April is often personified in literature as a goddess coming over the hill strewing flowers, as John Masefield put it: 'I have seen the Lady April bringing the daffodils, bringing the springing grass and the soft warm April rain.'

Even the very sound of the word 'April' is lovely I think.  Ap-ril.  As I noted recently in a poem I wrote, it sounds a bit like something being peeled - a fruit like a peach or an apple, a coat, an item of winter clothes - don't you think? A peeling off of the old and revealing of something new! April. Something shiny. Reminds me of the French word 'brille' (pronounced 'bree') for 'shining', as in the sun is shining ~ 'le soleil est brille.' It has that sense of light breaking through, the first dawn of the year. It conjures up all kinds of yellow and apricot hues.  April. An echoing sound like the bell of the new ringing. It is definitely the most pleasant sounding of all the months, a prelude to a smile on your lips as you say it. (Try it :) 

I love April. It's my favourite month, hands down. I love everything about it not least of all because it's my birthday in April and everyone feels a special affinity for their birth month, do they not? (Infact, a lot of birthdays of friends & family too.) It's the month I feel most at home in, the month I look forward to all year, the month in which I seem to get to be more me, if that makes sense. A decadent pink  blush of a month when everything turns sweeter than before.  The (pink) icing on the cake of the year.

It heralds a new beginning, not only astrologically, but seasonally too. You can't help but feel that everything is coming into bloom especially for you! There's no better time to have a birthday, when the 'greening of the earth' begins.  This feeling is heightened of course, by the fact that Easter is almost always in April with all its associations of rebirth and renewal. Delightfully, April is also the month when the first butterflies appear, little red and orange phoenixes, fluttering anew after their winter hibernation or caterpillar incarnation.  It is a time of new beginnings, not just on a personal front, but on an all-encompassing wider one. As ee cummings has noted the air is 'immortal with the fragrance of begin'.

April is the month when spring starts to really take hold, when skies get bluer, days get longer and everything begins to bud and blossom rapidly. What Rilke spoke of here: 'Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colours, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.' And most beautiful of all these blooms has to be the cherry blossom trees. April is the month when they come into bloom, pink bunched blossoms hanging against a canvas of blue sky, like cheerleaders of the month. Everywhere you go, there they are, waving their pink blushing cheery blooms. They always seem to me like a heart in full bloom, utterly uplifting, filled to bursting point with love of life, blooming unabashedly and brazenly for the time they have. Perfect mascots of the month.

Staying with the 'pink' vibe, April is the only month with a 'pink moon' - the name given to its full moon. It's not pink, of course (although this year we did have a red 'blood' moon for a while with the eclipse). It takes its name from the pink phlox that begins to appear at this time of year and I should think all the other pink blossoms too - namely camellias, cheery blossoms and tulips.

Another reason I love April is the fact that it's National Poetry Month and as such the NaPoWriMo challenge of 30 poems in 30 days. (See previous post.) What could be more pleasant than to have every day filled with poetry? (Sigh) And why was April chosen for this honour I wonder? Is it because of its strong poetry heritage? Or as it's the first month of the year when spirits are high? The perfect time for binge-writing after the dreariness of winter and before the busyness of summer? When poetic inspiration bursts forth into bloom with all the trees and flowers? And poems are like little chicks newly hatched making their way into the world...? Maybe.

Another reason I adore this month is that it puts me in mind of Paris.  Paris. The two are intrinsically linked. (Have you noticed that April's 'A' shares the same shape as the Eiffel Tower?) April is the best time to visit the city (like the song and the film and all the guidebooks ever written say!) Paris and April go together well, like Lapland and Christmas, tropical islands and summer... peaches and cream, or two exquisitely matched lovers strolling hand-in-hand beneath the horse-chestnut trees lining the parks now at their most inviting. The city is at its most famously beautiful in April with the cherry blossoms and geraniums in bloom everywhere, the sun bringing life to the leafy boulevards, romanticising evenings and providing the perfect setting for café-sitting, wine-drinking and people-watching. All those writers who were in love with Paris sang its praises in the spring: Hemingway talked of how in the spring, 'there were no problems except where to be happiest' and Henry Miller, 'when spring comes to Paris the humblest mortal alive must feel that he dwells in paradise.'  Every year April is when my Paris-making-plans start - I peruse the guidebooks, order yet more books and re-read Hemingway's 'A Moveable Feast' as well as all the other Paris books I have - in keeping with the old adage that 'April is a promise that May is bound to keep.' Here's hoping. April is such a happy, pretty, cheery month, 'when every happy growing thing laughs like a babe just roused from sleep.' It is a powerful month too, its green an enduring hope against death, as Wallace Steven demonstrates in his poem 'Sunday Morning' (quote below.) I hope you are enjoying it is much as I am! So far the month has been filled with sunshine and smiles. The weather so far has been glorious  and for Ireland that's quite a spectacular feat!

I'll leave you with some examples of the lovely sentiments I've come across on April. Most of these lines come from poems (some of which I have in full version here: A Poem a Day) all echoing the same feelings: enthusiasm, energy, optimism, wonder, awe, rebirth, rejuvenation, mirth, magic even. Read them and feel the glee!

~ Siobhán 

'April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.' 

~ Edna St Vincent Millay 'Spring'

 'Every tear is answered by a blossom/ Every high with songs and laughter blent/ Apple-blossoms upon the breezes toss them/ April knows her own and is content.' 

~ Susan Coolidge 'April' 

 'It's april (yes, april my darling, it's spring!) it's spring!' 
'Love is a deeper season than reason my sweet one (and april's where we're)'

~ ee cummings 

'April hath put a spirit of youth in everything.' 

~ Shakespeare

 'April... fairy month of waking mirth...' 

~ John Clare, 'Spring' 

'Winter’s done, and April’s in the skies.
Earth, look up with laughter in your eyes!' 

~ Charles GD Roberts 'April Adoration'

 

 'Sweet April, many a thought is wedded unto thee, as hearts are wed.' 

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

   'Paris; this april sunset completely utters.' ~ ee cummings

 

'Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall

My buried life, and Paris in the spring,

I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world

To be wonderful and youthful after all.'

~ TS Eliot

  'Make me over Mother April... when thy flowery hand... and great heart beats and quivers to revive the days that were.' 

~ Richard Hovey

'April prepares her green light and the world thinks: GO' 

~ Christopher Morley

  'There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures;' 

~ Wallace Stevens 'Sunday Morning' 

Always Marry an April Girl - Ogden Nash

Praise the spells and bless the charms,
I found April in my arms.
April golden, April cloudy,
Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy;
April soft in flowered languor,
April cold with sudden anger,
Ever changing, ever true -
I love April, I love you.     

***  

NaPoWriMo 2014

Well, it's April and that can only mean only thing.... NaPoWriMo! National Poetry Writing 

Month is ON! The challenge to write a poem a day - that's 30 poems in 30 days - will either inspire and elate you or leave you hyperventilating and running for the hills! 

We happy simmering poets though, we relish it. Even though the challenge of it may, at first glance seem insurmountable and intimidating, if you give it a moment to settle and look closer, you'll see that it offers all kinds of opportunities for inspiration and motivation, not to mention the much-needed self-discipline to write daily. 

The official website: www.napowrimo.net offers daily prompts and daily poetry entries from participating bloggers. The prompts range from using specific poetic forms to quirky thematic takes: today for example, was to write a love poem to an inanimate object. The most fun exercise so far!

I took part in NaPo last year, and this year I've set up a separate blog for the month to publish the poems on. If you want to take a peep, you can click here: www.napowrimobysiobhan.blogspot.com or click on the icon I have (proudly) displayed at the top right-hand corner of this blog.  

This post is a week too late to probe the blogosphere for participating poets, but if you're doing it, I'd love to hear how you are getting on! Drop me a line, send me a link, share your experience. 

Thirty days of poetry, it's an all-in ride - exhilarating and exhausting. Live, breathe and eat poetry, almost. Some days the muse is silent, other days she shouts. What I'm enjoying most especially is - apart from the ongoing swapping of poems with other poet friends by email as a support system - is the proximity of words, the immersion of my whole thinking day in poetry.

Specifically the zinging feeling I have every morning when I wake up, knowing today is a day when I will write a poem, bad or good, by hook or by crook, but I WILL write one. I can't tell you what that feeling does to the big bad Block. It's a powerful antidote. Then there's the word-woozy feeling at the end of the day, when words hop and skip through my mind, not shy anymore but flamboyant, fueled by a new potential. And sleep is not a solace but a temptress, lulling me reluctantly away from a newly-discovered wonderful word world. 

Yep, that's pretty cool. 

~ Siobhán

*And for those of you who equate poetry with pain, and the involvement in NaPo as a marathon trek, then here is William Carlos Williams with the unapologetic truth of the process:

We do it because we love it so! :)

Sunday Morning Musing: Heart Over Head

"If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing." ~Marc Chagall

Artists give good advice. I agree wholeheartedly here with Chagall. One look over his paintings and you can see they came from love, an innate love not only for what he was painting, but for life itself, and love.

The same applies to writing too, of course. If you don't love your subject, it will fall flat in front of you. The head is fine for fixing and editing and analysing, but the creation point, the will to create, the motivation, the spark of inspiration, must come from the heart, the site of feeling. 

Science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury has echoed the same sentiment:  

“Write only what you love, and love what you write. The key word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.” He then goes on to instruct us budding writers: "...And out of that love, remake a world.” 

Ambition won't do it, talent alone won't do it. Only love - love for what you do, pure passion, innate investment  - will. As Bukowski too, puts it - write only if 'the sun inside you is burning your gut' to do it. 

Yes.

~ Siobhán