Work Worth Keeping

In the mailbox this morning: Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet’s job. The rest is literature. . .Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don’t like — then cultivate it. That’s the only part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping. – Jean Cocteau, A Call to Order (1926). Quote attribution by Garrison Keillor in Writers' Almanac, online, July5, 2021.