Life & Wisdom Quote by Norman MacCaig

Writing, for Norman MacCaig, isn’t a heroic act of self-expression so much as a bodily function with a human ache inside it. The first move - “like breathing in and out” - strips poetry of glamour. Breath is constant, involuntary, and sustaining; it suggests that language is how he metabolizes experience. That plainness is a kind of brag, but not the Instagrammable sort: it’s the poet insisting that craft is necessity, not performance.

Then he swerves into something lonelier: “a conversation with someone who isn’t there.” MacCaig frames the poem as dialogue, not diary. Even in solitude, the poet is oriented outward, rehearsing contact. The absent listener can be read as the reader, the dead, the divine, the beloved, the community he’s writing from and for - but the crucial point is the vacancy. Poetry happens in the space between speaker and imagined reply.

“Because it has to be addressed to somebody” is a quiet manifesto about form. Address creates pressure: you choose tone, you shape an argument, you make yourself intelligible. Even when the “somebody” isn’t “a particular person,” the act of addressing prevents the poem from dissolving into private symbolism. It’s MacCaig, the Scottish modern poet shaped by war, landscape, and a hard-earned skepticism, insisting on connection without sentimentality: you speak into the air, but you speak as if it matters who’s listening. That “very rarely” admits the exception - poems that are true messages - while defending the larger engine of his work: an intimate public voice, built for an unknown other.