At Kim Stafford’s poetry workshop I accidentally wrote a poem that told a secret even though I wasn’t thinking of the secret and when it came time to share what we had written I read something else. Is this what poems do—make you say things you want to keep hidden? It is ok to keep some things hidden which just means private as long as you know what they are. Oh and sometimes our mind kindly keeps things hidden from us and there’s nothing wrong with that either. It is generous on the part of the mind to look out for us this way.
I think secrets just want to come out and grab any weak moment they can find to blurt out. It was commendable of you to read something else that day, though.
Do you mean because I was willing to read something bad instead? A conflict between my writer’s ego and my sense of privacy…
Sometimes a secret can be shared quietly, so only those with eyes seeking, can see…
so true, Ant.
Oh, I assumed–don’t know why–you were keeping a shared secret, not purely your own. I think it’s wrong to blab someone else’s secret. But I also think we should be loyal to our own secrets–at the very least in a writing group. Writers are like magpies. They’ll remember your secret and use it in their next novels.
Even worse, we’ll forget it was someone else’s secret and imagine that we made it up ourselves and so it belongs to us.