Letters to a Young Poet

Nadja Kukor – mask maker, performance artist and bohemian – highly recommends Letters to a Young Poet. She says it "is nourishing, inspiring, indispensable, my Bible, a massage to my soul. Rainer Maria Rilke guides us to look, to taste, to touch, even to smell inward, and to be."
This book is a collection of ten letters written by the Rainer Maria Rilke to a young student and poet, Franz Xaver Kappus. Their correspondence began in 1902 and continued through 1908. Kappus wrote to the famous poet seeking advice. Rilke responded with letters about poetry and about surviving as a sensitive observer in a harsh world. In this collection, Kappus included those letters that are "important for an understanding of the world in which Rainer Maria Rilke lived and worked, and important too for many growing and evolving spirits of today and tomorrow."

From the first letter from Rainer Maria Rilke,
You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write.

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