Literary Man Poem by gershon hepner

LITERARY MAN

It wakes him, it’s exercise and it is rest
for the literary man. That, in a nutshell, is writing
for someone by writing completely obsessed,
and for me it’s the thing that I find most exciting
in life when I wake. I don’t exercise, though,
too busy with writing, but do find some time
to rest, but then, till it is time that I go
to sleep, I am writing more poems in rhyme.


Nicholson Baker (“Letter to John Updike, ” NYR,7/15/10) wrote a letter to John Updike when he was twenty-eight, on 3/18/85. It included this passage from John Jay Chapman:

Your complete literary man writes all the time. It wakes him in the morning to write, it exercises him to write, it rests him to write. Writing is to him a visit from a friend, a cup of tea, a game of cards, a walk in the country, a warm bath, an after-dinner nap, a hot Scotch before bed, and the sleep that follows it. Your complete literary chap is a writing animal; and when he dies he leaves a cocoon as large as a haystack, in which every breath he has drawn is recorded in writing.

7/4/10 #9066