Advice to poets

Tonight I read this astonishing piece by ee cummings, whose lines about plums we all read in the sixth grade and whose non-use of punctuation always seemed right to me.

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.
This may sound easy, but it isn't.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel -- but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling -- not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know,you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time - and whenever we do it, we are not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world -- unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does this sound dismal? It isn't.
It's the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.

Last night I sat in bed with all my candles lit, reading and waiting. The fact of having no lights or electricity made the evening longer and more peaceful, but my thoughts kept coming and would have no part of sleep. Tomorrow an airplane will alight and bring with it a visitor I wish were a permanent feature of this city.

Today I felt disconnected, apart, all day long. Some days my architecture class at Los Andes has this effect on me - I'm rendered mute by the language of buildings, auditoriums, plazas. Also by my silly unspoken but easily legible disdain for some of my classmates, but that's another story. They are rich college kids like rich college kids everywhere -- but for some reason, being in Colombia, they bug me more.

We visited another university today - Jaime Lozada - which has an amazing, hulking, concrete yet airy library bordering its main plaza. Somehow I don't care much about the ideas "modern" or "aesthetic" but I care a great deal about large hunks of concrete with gaping squares cut out just so, to let the light in.

The professor talked about the tilt of the sun, the movements of the earth, days when everything aligns, days when there is less or more light than on any other day. I wanna know - do architects consider solstice? And is there an astronomical term for days when nothing lines up right? Somehow nighttime has a way of fixing things for me, setting the world right in a way that's impossible in the daylight. And tomorrow will surely come.

---

From one window, Preservancia sits, waits, patient facades with dark openings and surfaces that glare their blue sheen at the world. An inventory of poverty lies undone. another idea from a book I read, so what else is new? Directly below, sun-touched students gather in the plaza of one of those universities that has never seen a protest, or imagined reason for one.