writing-out

Yeats: ‘Even when the poet seems most himself… he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea, something intended, complete.’

and Eliot: ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.’

it’s a catharsis, a constant sleight-of-hand remediation. which is why thom yorke can seemingly lyricise a nervous breakdown and yet still spend his saturday nights flailing around the dancefloor, grinning to the world, as when I saw him at the zodiac. a necessary writing-out of the self.