Making art is like setting a trap
Philip Larkin on constructing “the device”
“It is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects of things normally regarded as complicated.” So begins a 1957 essay by the English poet and librarian Philip Larkin, titled “The Pleasure Principle,” in which Larkin breaks down the writing of a poem into three stages. Since this newsletter often seems to be focused on complicating the creative process—what can I say, I like making things difficult—today I thought it might be fun to join Larkin in taking a stab at simplicity.
So here are Larkin’s three stages of writing a poem, which I think you could apply pretty easily to any kind of artistic practice:
Stage one: Get obsessed with a feeling
Specifically, Larkin writes that you must become “obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that [you are] compelled to do something about it.”
OK, simple enough—though I think it’s worth noting that this first stage is where a lot of creative projects falter! If your initial impulse is to, say, show off how brilliant and sensitive you are, or to compete with what your fellow artists are doing, or to win money and fame, then—according to Larkin—you’ve failed before you’ve even started. As he writes, “If there has been no preliminary feeling, the device [i.e., the poem] has nothing to reproduce and the reader will experience nothing.”