Letter to a Reading Poet Writer Artist

This is part of an email I sent recently to a young writer and poet and I thought it would be useful for people here.

Dear ..............

.................................................................

To demonstrate what I am going say I shall not use any punctuation in this email making you The Leader to decide on how this text should punctuate itself that is suitable for it in your judgement

The snobs at Universities that teach creative writing courses misguiding and breaking young writers about the very thing they ought not forget or lose which is the sense of wonder the sense of beautiful inquisitiveness of a child

Since as soon as that eternal child dies away inside a human being the Artist inside her dies with the child

I had once spent a whole morning on the Southbank listening out for people's conversations in order to write a poem titled A Fogheld Oak Tree Poem where I only heard a little girl and a little boy using some words to the effect to show me or make me feel that life was still a wonder-wounded thing

The adults' language was mostly dead full of dry dread and dreadfulness and only the boy said pointing at the River Look And the little girl sitting next to him offering him some of her sandwich said Won't you have some of mine or something to that effect

There is nothing wrong in using exclamation marks if one feels one needs to since one has felt that excitement

In fact there is everything wrong in trying to make things appear "sophisticated" so that there is nothing left of life in the piece of the writing that is worth experiencing

Why on earth call it creative writing when some people have taken one's brain out of one's head and placed in there instead a broken and dreadful circuit of their own that does not work

In fact I do not find any point of punctuations at all with regards to creative writing

I am working at the moment with a novel that has no punctuation marks whatsoever used in it and I hear you ask But why

This is why 

I work my sweat and blood out to bring life to the foyer I swim through ocean of poison and seek and search and find wondrous pearls for the Reader and I expect her to work as heard if not harder I want her to work hard so to be able to live the most of her life

I want her to be able to be an Active Reader giving her the whole of life without punctuations making her the director to impose the punctuation for herself to claim the story and life for herself and in this I approach The Reader who in my judgement and faith possesses a mind of her own and that she has a brain that has intelligence inside her head that the media and the snobs do not think for her as well as the fact that I have the faith that she is capable of doing this herself and does not need us to chew everything for her so that she is robbed off the opportunity to actually experience the joy of chewing or eating or drinking

I am tired of hearing about these snobs and the craps they are coming up with

The Market god has taken on and broken successfully our universities that now produce human potatoes and carrots in the right size and shape to fit in the Tesco tills or Barclays' counters or this or that

The same Market god is killing creative writing and particularly poetry

It has broken most creative branches including music only poetry  has put up the longest resistance against this and still trying and must must must continue to do so

I do not want to see vegetable writers or poets or artists I would rather have writers who eat hunger and sleep thirst and breathe rough of life so that they come up with something that no one has ever come up with before

I do not want to see illiterate writers or poets who do not read and have no clues of life or living but actually just vomiting out trained garbage

If that does not happen I am sorry I am not at all interested in whatever it is that they are coming up with

No one can and shall be able to train out a Socrates or Einstein or Samuel Taylor Coleridge or William Shakespeare or Becket or Dostoyevsky or Hughes or Keats or Neruda or Pasternak or Tolstoy

And even if they try I shall have nothing to do with their crimes”

Munayem Mayenin

Editor