Writers Writing about Writing, Right?

Dear Billy Collins,

Some of my favorite writing is that of writers writing about writing. But you have taken that a step further, a poet poetizing about poeting.

The other day I read, I don’t remember where, (Where would that have been? Online? In a bookstore? Metropulse? Not here.) I read a passage by John Lennon that brought you to mind. He talked about wondering why people in his life didn’t notice how special he was as a child. His observation was a bit like yours in You, Reader from The Trouble With Poetry:

I wonder how you are going to feel
When you find out
That I wrote this instead of you.

Is writing, and especially writing poetry, a competition of some sort? Are we, writers or aspiring writers, really so self-absorbed that we think that it is only we who see the beauty and must announce it, teletyping it out across the wires, racing to say it first, to break the news. . . Sumer is icumen in or. . . the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n. Do writers write to write or do they write to be read, or perhaps, (ah, less worthy than we thought) do they write to write better than other writers?

Certainly, our greatest writers have left behind a trail of evidences about why, after all, they are writing. Annie Dillard describes the writing life as if an architect, "laying out a line of words." Welty wrote and not satisfied to tell us just about her writing beginnings, told us both what she would and would not advise.

But, this is your life and you have the pulpit, should we criticize you for using it? No, for we wish to hear your words, see your visions, look out your windows. And after all, you are right that:

The clerks are at their desks,
The miners are down in their mines,

but

The poets are looking out their windows
because it is their job for which
they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.

Thanks for writing.

Betsy