"Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems"
About this Quote
Bichsel’s line bristles with a quiet annoyance that feels instantly familiar: the way society treats “stopping” as a moral failure, especially for writers. The opening question isn’t seeking an answer; it’s a rebuke to the interview logic that turns a life into a productivity graph. Why did you stop publishing, stop performing, stop being “relevant”? The subtext is that the question is less about curiosity than consumption. We want the next book the way we want the next season.
The sly pivot to the drawer does the real work. A drawer is private, domestic, almost embarrassingly ordinary, and that’s the point. Bichsel punctures the romantic myth that a writer’s value is identical with public output. Most people, he suggests, hoard unfinished artifacts: poems, letters, sketches, abandoned plans. The writer is only “different” because their half-made things are expected to become commodities. By calling those hidden poems “dear,” he insists they can be precious without being completed, polished, or monetized.
Context matters here because Bichsel’s reputation was never built on maximal production; his strength was compression, the short form, the deliberately modest gesture that reveals a social truth. The quote reads like a defense of artistic privacy in a culture of constant explainability. It’s also a gentle leveling: everyone has a drawer. The writer’s stopped work isn’t a scandal; it’s a human habit we only interrogate when it belongs to someone we’ve decided owes us more.
The sly pivot to the drawer does the real work. A drawer is private, domestic, almost embarrassingly ordinary, and that’s the point. Bichsel punctures the romantic myth that a writer’s value is identical with public output. Most people, he suggests, hoard unfinished artifacts: poems, letters, sketches, abandoned plans. The writer is only “different” because their half-made things are expected to become commodities. By calling those hidden poems “dear,” he insists they can be precious without being completed, polished, or monetized.
Context matters here because Bichsel’s reputation was never built on maximal production; his strength was compression, the short form, the deliberately modest gesture that reveals a social truth. The quote reads like a defense of artistic privacy in a culture of constant explainability. It’s also a gentle leveling: everyone has a drawer. The writer’s stopped work isn’t a scandal; it’s a human habit we only interrogate when it belongs to someone we’ve decided owes us more.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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