Monday, October 18, 2010

Writing from Your Own Emptiness

I have just found yet another reason why I'm drawn to the boys from Dublin. 
I remember as a child, growing up in Ireland. We were taught the poetry of William Butler Yeats. I must have been ten years old. The teacher said, "and then Yeats went through his dry period. He had a writing block and he couldn't write about anything." I remember putting up my hand, and saying "Well, why didn't he write about that?" And the teacher just looked at me and said, "Oh, be quiet." But that is exactly the answer to the writing block. You write about your own emptiness, and we've done that for years now.
~ Bono  
http://www.ascap.com/jam/feature_artists/u2.html

2 comments:

Allison Hawkins said...

I have loved U2 since 1983. He had a memoir come out in the last five years that's pretty illuminating. Like about his comment about writing through your emptiness. I watched Bono evolve as a songwriter from that first albumn up to where they are now. but the Joshua Tree had so much visual language I've used in in English classes for a show of metaphor

Pat Washington said...

Thanks for stopping by, Allison!

Imagine if he would have taken that teacher's admonition to heart and stayed quiet. And imagine if the band would have taken the advice of influential people in their Christian fellowship and quit the band. How sad that would have been. Not sad for us though, because we would have never known. But sad nonetheless. Perhaps sad to God, and sad for the souls of Bono and his mates. They do what they were born to do.