CREATIVITY

To inflict hurt on someone is *also* a failure of the imagination. And is not imagination one of an artist's basic tools? So I was tested recently in the writing of one of the poems for my 2007 book. That is, I wrote a poem but it would hurt the real-life person who inspired it....but (I thought) it was a good poem.

It took a few days of thinking about it...and then I managed to come up with a version "edited" to take away its ability to hurt the person it references, while still being a good poem.

Perhaps when I was younger, I would have just stopped at having already writ a good poem the first go-round (O, ye youthful arrogance). But now I know that art need not demand we become crappy people. Which is also to say, I sometimes (not always, but sometimes) get impatient at those who think hurting some group is a sign of an art work's effectiveness...

...War, of course, might be the greatest failure of human imagination...