So who hasn't had this book recommended to them about fifty times in their poetry studentship? Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke must be the most-recommended book for young poets…heck, the title implicitly begs to be read by novice bards.
I pulled off my copy (that I bought in Westchester, NY, back in the mid-1990s) from the bookshelf and opened a page randomly for some craft advise for today.
Bingo! That's how easy this is!
"You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
What a good focus goal: to write about one of your questions, letting go of all possible answers.
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