Eliot said that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." What he meant by that is, the emotional understanding comes before you understand the argument that follows later in the text. Fred D'Aguiar More Quotes by Fred D'Aguiar More Quotes From Fred D'Aguiar To have a young person speak back, to hand him the microphone for his first-person utterances, you'd have to have an imagined architecture, otherwise people would say you're putting words in their mouths. Fred D'Aguiar utterance hands people To close the empathetic gap, you really want to get the person emotionally identifying [with your subject and characters], and then when you do that, then you want sneak in a lesson about history and about politics and whatever else you might think about. Fred D'Aguiar sneak-in character thinking The first hit on the nervous system is the one I'm most interested in, because I think if you hit the reader emotionally, the reader can't guarantee the lessons they would like to learn. Fred D'Aguiar lessons guarantees thinking With kids, they force you to get out of bed. They force you to smile. They remind you of spontaneity. Fred D'Aguiar spontaneity bed kids I'm interested in someone who's mired in grief: how do you get back to that thing that makes them warm? Because you know that's in there. Fred D'Aguiar get-back grief knows If you die without agency as a child, but you have agency in your body [in the novel], how is it to be enacted unless it is being reimagined by a writer? Fred D'Aguiar agency body children There's an imperative to make sure you distinguish fiction from the fact, because if the fact is doing the work, why did you do fiction? And once you raise the question of why - why do fiction? - then you have to answer it in your text as a kind of enactment of the answer. Fred D'Aguiar answers facts fiction People were always hungry, bullied, afraid, paranoid - so I just thought I'd show that in the novel in a kind of suffocating way. Fred D'Aguiar kind people way When you walk to the end of a fiction, its procedure is 1) intuitive; and 2) emotional. Its intelligence is emotional, I think. Fred D'Aguiar emotional fiction thinking
