{"id":10551,"date":"2013-06-25T22:03:08","date_gmt":"2013-06-26T02:03:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/?p=10551"},"modified":"2013-06-25T22:03:08","modified_gmt":"2013-06-26T02:03:08","slug":"it-is-dangerous-to-leave-written-that-which-is-badly-written","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/2013\/06\/25\/it-is-dangerous-to-leave-written-that-which-is-badly-written\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written.&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks back, I ran across a piece of my writing from a few decades ago that was so horrendous I felt I dared not share it with you. And <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/scottedelman\/status\/342830714439483392\">when I told you that<\/a>, I asked that you remember what Ezra Pound had said.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\">\n<p>Found a poem I wrote 20+ years ago about Clarion. Man, was I pretentious! I _won&#39;t_ be sharing it with you. Remember what Ezra Pound said.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Scott Edelman (@scottedelman) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/scottedelman\/statuses\/342830714439483392\">June 7, 2013<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>I figured I should share the exact quote\u2014but when I went looking, I couldn&#8217;t find it. And neither could my friends who know more about Pound than I ever will. Which meant the only way to track down the quote was to dig out my diaries and find the page on which I had copied it over in my own hand from a book I&#8217;d found while visiting a friend in Eugene, Oregon. (I was staying with him because we&#8217;d attended Clarion together and I was going to head over to Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm&#8217;s house in the same city to take part in one of their famous workshops.)<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I&#8217;ve now finally found the time to locate the right diary\u2014I&#8217;ve been keeping up with it since 1978 and so had a LOT of volumes to go through\u2014and learned exactly why none of us could find that Pound quote, even with all the power of the Internet at our disposal.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Because what I was remembering wasn&#8217;t an Ezra Pound quote.<\/p>\n<p>It was a William Carlos Williams quote.<\/p>\n<p>And it goes like this:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written. A chance word, upon paper, may destroy the world. Watch carefully and erase, while the power is still yours, I say to myself, for all that is put down, once it escapes, may rot its way into a thousand minds, the corn become a black smut, and all libraries, of necessity, be burned to the ground as a consequence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It was, according to my March 24, 1982 diary entry, from page 129 of <em>Paterson<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>And regardless of whether offered up by Pound or Williams, it&#8217;s still advice I take to heart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks back, I ran across a piece of my writing from a few decades ago that was so horrendous I felt I dared not share it with you. And when I told you that, I asked that you remember what Ezra Pound had said. Found a poem I wrote 20+ years ago about [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[142,315,316,317],"class_list":["post-10551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-damon-knight","tag-ezra-pound","tag-kate-wilhelm","tag-william-carlos-williams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10551\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scottedelman.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}