“A poet doesn’t invent his poetry—he finds it,” he said, to no one in particular. “The place,” he added slowly, “where Alph, the sacred river ran—was found out, not invented.”
He looked out the window from where he sat. He seemed to look as far out of the room as he could. “I can’t stand any kind of inventiveness,” he said.
(Excerpted from The Inverted Forest by J.D. Salinger)
There was a time when I couldn’t get enough of J.D. Salinger, the famously reclusive writer of the book The Catcher in the Rye, which still sells a million copies a year to this day.
I loved his writing style. I loved his simple sentences and how they flowed, the way each sentence seemed to pull me into the next, like I was being taken on a journey.
Anyway, among Salinger’s works is a novella titled The Inverted Forest, which is a story about a young girl named Corinne, who can’t erase the memory of a boy she once knew, and what happens when she runs into him many years later.
The reason I bring this all up is because in The Inverted Forest, Salinger wrote that a poet doesn’t invent his poetry, he finds it, and that’s exactly how I felt when I thought I’d finally found the ending to my own novel that I’d been searching for for so long.