Rilke: Letter to A Young Poet

"You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have already asked others. You send them to journals. You compare them with other poems, and are upset when certain editorial offices reject your efforts. Now (since you’ve permitted me to give you advice) I ask you to abandon all this. You look outside yourself, and that above all else is something you should not do just now. Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There’s only one way to proceed. Go inside yourself."

I have been reading and thinking about Rilke's poems and have just found the time to wander back to this. It's a book of 10 letter Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to a young (I would say, for the benefit of the NINA crew, Treplovian) poet who wrote asking him for advice. This will be, I think, an important foundational document for us, mostly because it helps to articulate the value of SOLITUDE as a practice and pursuit, which is the essence of hermitish behavior. I am not sure if it is popular to believe in the self anymore, at least not with the fervor that Rilke believes in it, but our project wants to hypothesize the existence of a self that we can access through the exercise of solitude. There may be contexts in which this self is elusive--and maybe only an undiscovered hypothesis. But there are, the piece posits, things to find within us if we look for them. (Just to play this out: there are times when I am sure that there is money in one of my pants pockets and I search for it with a vengeance...and just because it's never in either of the two pockets I can be looking in at a given moment, that doesn't mean the money isn't in another of my pockets. Or was shaken out and is in the vicinity.)

I recommend that, if you are interested in this project, you check into these letters. The quote above is from a relatively new translation. Early on, I suspect we may occupy ourselves in rehearsal by reading some of these out loud. And sections of them may find their way into the piece. Indeed, I am imagining that Rilke may be the writer whose texts unify the "hermit" sequence of short pieces that we will be making.

more soon.