Quote #40

My English teacher from 1955, run to ground by some documentary crew trying to explain my life, said that in her class I had showed no particular promise. This was true. Until the descent of the giant thumb, I showed no particular promise. I also showed no particular promise for some time afterwards, but I did not know this. A lot of being a poet consists of willed ignorance. If you woke up from your trance and realized the nature of the life-threatening and dignity-destroying precipice you were walking along, you would switch into actuarial sciences immediately. If I had not been ignorant in this particular way, I would not have announced to an assortment of my high school female friends, in the cafeteria one brown-bag lunchtime, that I was going to be a writer. I said 'writer,' not 'poet;' I did have some common sense. But my announcement was certainly a conversation-stopper. Sticks of celery were suspended in mid-crunch, peanut-butter sandwiches paused halfway between table and mouth; nobody said a word. One of those present reminded me of this incident recently - I had repressed it - and said she had been simply astounded. 'Why?,' I said. 'Because I wanted to be a writer?' 'No,' she said. 'Because you had the guts to say it out loud.'

More from Margaret Atwood

  1. As for my birth month, a detail of much interest to poets, obsessed as they are with symbolic systems of all kinds: I was not pleased, duri…
  2. The one good thing to be said about announcing yourself as a writer in the colonial Canadian fifties is that nobody told me I couldn't do i…
  3. I did not know that the rules about these things were different if you were female. I did not know that 'poetess' was an insult, and that I…
  4. I will pass over my flirtation with journalism as a way of making a living, an idea I dropped when I discovered that in the fifties - unlik…
  5. The day I became a poet was a sunny day of no particular ominousness. I was walking across the football field, not because I was sports-min…
  6. After a year or two of keeping my head down and trying to pass myself off as a normal person, I made contact with the five other people at …
  7. I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.
  8. Like all twenty-one-year-old poets, I thought I would be dead by thirty, and Sylvia Plath had not set a helpful example. For a while there,…

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