Kevin Berger: Would you say that writing is a surrogate for what we need but can’t seem to find in real life?
Richard Powers: The appeal of writing is the illusion that you can somehow bring about the completion and perfection of those things that will always elude you in real time. I suppose if we could find the life that we needed, and if it were intrinsically gratifying, that the need to narrate something outside of real-time interaction with people would really diminish. In a sense, the people we create in a book come from the people we know, but the conversations that we have with them in the book are the ones that we could never have with them in real life.
And yet the act of writing the life that we aren’t able to lead can complement the act of leading a life that we wouldn’t have been able to lead had we not the restorative power of writing and reading. This takes us back to this question of why reading and writing need to be defended. In reading and writing, in this locating the life that we have not yet been able to lead, we can make ourselves more capable of acting under fire. That’s the life of symbols. That’s what we are.
— The Art of Fiction No. 175 (an interview with Richard Powers by Kevin Berger), The Paris Review
“I believe that the function of literature is to preside over its own graduation. What’s at stake is this almost untenable conversation between inimicals, between the interior landscape, the self-telling story, and this irrefutable outside world. If literature is presiding over this extremely volatile dilemma—our desire to be outside of material and temporal constraint, and our inability to live anywhere except inside the curse of matter—then it can provide both a complete withdrawal from the world and an imaginative return to it. Literature at its best can recast the terms of power in that conversation.
I’ve always believed a book functions best when it leaves a person more capable of living in the world. As readers, we experience a palpable, realistic verisimilitude. In the act of identifying with characters, we suspend belief in the material world and adopt the world of the narration. By calling attention to that artifice, and allowing the reader simultaneously to feel that world as a believable, palpable world, and also as a made thing, the book becomes more powerful.”
— Richard Powers, The Art of Fiction No. 175 (interview by Kevin Berger), The Paris Review
“A lot of people who have written about me have written about the architecture and the large-scale design of my work, which is important to me. But it’s really the individual sentence that I work at again and again until it becomes the thing it’s trying to describe. To me, that sense of complete commensurability between form and content at the level of the individual sentence is really what writing is all about. I love to see how much load a sentence can bear. I don’t want it to be a performance. I don’t want it to call attention to itself as a virtuosic set piece. But I do want somehow to do this double-voicing where a sentence can reflect the virtuosity of the human mind. Reflect the multiplicity and richness of a sensibility as it tries to synthesize all these inimical things in the experiential world. What I really like to learn how to do is to build sentences that are equal to mental states.”
— Richard Powers, The Art of Fiction No. 175 (interview by Kevin Berger), The Paris Review (via theparisreview)
“Novelists want to flood, poets want to distill.”
— J. D. McClatchy, The Art of Poetry No. 84 (interview by Daniel Hall), The Paris Review
Daniel Hall: Is writing an ongoing occupation for you? Is there always a poem on the desk? Or several? And how long is it, usually, before they find their way off the desk, into the world, or the trash?
J. D. McClatchy: Do I have a regular routine? No. Do I write every day? No. Of course I write a good deal else than poetry, and deadlines tend to dictate how time is spent. Most of my poems are done in my head; very little is worked up at the desk. The desk is just where it’s written down. And poems themselves often come in binges. Months of doing anything but, then a sudden urge, other tasks pushed aside. That’s usually because—often consciously, sometimes not—I’ve been brooding on things, plotting a theme and variations. When it wants to be on paper, it comes quickly. I usually have a working draft of a whole poem within a few days. It’s then revised over a period of weeks. The computer’s boundless patience is a godsend, of course, in all this, spitting out alternatives. The advantage of this method is that I usually abandon unpromising material before it gets written down—by which point it’s often harder to scrub the mission.
While revising a poem, I’m looking for three things mostly: a certain honesty or consistency, and then ways to depart and ways to connect. I want, first, to be as sure as I can be that what I’ve written is what I mean to say, is what I actually or might actually feel. Then, a part of me is impatient with what has been, as it were, thoughtfully worked out, and searches for ways in which the poem can surprise itself, can depart from its suggested route. And a part of me too is looking for ways to circle back and link things, old or new, together—by, say, capitalizing on the suggestive overtones of an adjective or the etymology of a verb, as ways to establish emotional connections among episodes or stanzas.
Pushing fledglings out of the nest? I’m rarely in a rush to do that. I’ve written poems that have stayed in my drawer a year or two before I’ve thought to send them off—just as I have revised poems after they’ve been published. Mind you, I do believe in getting on with things. As Victor Hugo said, you correct one work only in another.
— The Art of Poetry No. 84 (an interview with J. D. McClatchy by Daniel Hall), The Paris Review
“In an odd sense, my younger self is my ghost. I write about what haunts me.”
— J. D. McClatchy, The Art of Poetry No. 84 (interview by Daniel Hall), The Paris Review (via theparisreview)
“Nobody tells people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me, is that, if you’re watching this video, you’re somebody who wants to make videos, right? And all of us who do creative work, like, you know, we get into it, and we get into it because we have good taste. Do you know what I mean? Like, you wanna make TV because you love TV, you know what I mean, because there’s stuff that you just, like, love. Okay? So you’ve got really good taste, and you get into this thing that I don’t even know how to describe but it’s like there’s a gap. That for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good, okay? It’s not that great. It’s, it’s really not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not quite that good. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, your taste is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you, you know what I mean? Like you can tell that it’s still sort of crappy?
A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people, at that point, they quit. And the thing I would just, like, say to you with all my heart, is that most everybody I know who does interesting creative work, they went through a phase of years where they had really good taste and they could tell what they were making wasn’t as good as they wanted it to be, they knew that it fell short. And some of us could admit that to ourselves and some of us are a little less able to admit that to ourselves. But we knew, like, it didn’t have this special thing that we wanted it to have. And the thing I would say to you is that everybody goes through that. And for you to go through it, if you’re going through it right now, if you’re just getting out of that phase, if you’re just starting off and you’re entering into that phase, you gotta know it’s totally normal, and the most important possible thing you could do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re gonna finish one story, you know what I mean? Whatever it’s gonna be, like, you create the deadline. It’s best if you have somebody who’s waiting for work from you, somebody who’s expecting work from you. Even if it’s not somebody who pays you, but that you’re in a situation where you have to turn out the work. Because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap, and the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.
[…]
I guess I’m saying, like, it takes a while, it’s gonna take you a while, it’s normal to take a while. And you just have to fight your way through that, okay? You will be fierce, you will be a warrior, and you will make things that aren’t as good as you know in your heart you want them to be. And you will just make one after another.”
— Ira Glass, Ira Glass on Storytelling, part 3 of 4, PRI
(via prayingbuddha)
(Source: topographe)
“I write everywhere. I could write here, as I am talking to you. When in Maine or elsewhere, when I am traveling, I write wherever I am or whenever I can. Writing doesn’t require too much energy—it is a relaxation, and a joy.”
— Marguerite Yourcenar, The Art of Fiction No. 103 (interview by Shusha Guppy), The Paris Review (via theparisreview)
“My poetry has passed through the same stages as my life; from a solitary childhood and an adolescence cornered in distant, isolated countries, I set out to make myself a part of the great human multitude. My life matured, and that is all. It was in the style of the last century for poets to be tormented melancholiacs. But there can be poets who know life, who know its problems, and who survive by crossing through the currents. And who pass through sadness to plenitude.”
— Pablo Neruda, The Art of Poetry No. 14 (interview by Rita Guibert; translated by Ronald Christ), The Paris Review
Rita Guibert: You have often said that you don’t believe in originality.
Pablo Neruda: To look for originality at all costs is a modern condition. In our time, the writer wants to call attention to himself, and this superficial preoccupation takes on fetishistic characteristics. Each person tries to find a road whereby he will stand out, neither for profundity nor for discovery, but for the imposition of a special diversity. The most original artist will change phases in accord with the time, the epoch. The great example is Picasso, who begins by nourishing himself from the painting and sculpture of Africa or the primitive arts, and then goes on with such a power of transformation that his works, characterized by his splendid originality, seem to be stages in the cultural geology of the world.
— The Art of Poetry No. 14 (an interview with Pablo Neruda by Rita Guibert; translated by Ronald Christ), The Paris Review
Rita Guibert: What advice would you give to young poets?
Pablo Neruda: Oh, there is no advice to give to young poets! They ought to make their own way; they will have to encounter the obstacles to their expression and they have to overcome them. What I would never advise them to do is to begin with political poetry. Political poetry is more profoundly emotional than any other—at least as much as love poetry—and cannot be forced because it then becomes vulgar and unacceptable. It is necessary first to pass through all other poetry in order to become a political poet. The political poet must also be prepared to accept the censure which is thrown at him—betraying poetry, or betraying literature. Then, too, political poetry has to arm itself with such content and substance and intellectual and emotional richness that it is able to scorn everything else. This is rarely achieved.
— The Art of Poetry No. 14 (an interview with Pablo Neruda by Rita Guibert; translated by Ronald Christ), The Paris Review
Rita Guibert: You are one of the most widely translated poets—into about thirty languages. Into what languages are you best translated?
Pablo Neruda: I would say into Italian, because of the similarity between the two languages. English and French, which are the two languages I know outside of Italian, are languages which do not correspond to Spanish—neither in vocalization, or in the placement, or the color, or the weight of the words. It is not a question of interpretative equivalence; no, the sense can be right, but this correctness of translation, of meaning, can be the destruction of a poem. In many of the translations into French—I don’t say in all of them—my poetry escapes, nothing remains; one cannot protest because it says the same thing that one has written. But it is obvious that if I had been a French poet, I would not have said what I did in that poem, because the value of the words is so different. I would have written something else.
Guibert: And in English?
Neruda: I find the English language so different from Spanish—so much more direct—that many times it expresses the meaning of my poetry, but does not convey the atmosphere of my poetry. It may be that the same thing happens when an English poet is translated into Spanish.
— The Art of Poetry No. 14 (an interview with Pablo Neruda by Rita Guibert; translated by Ronald Christ), The Paris Review
“[B]y preference I write in the morning… . I don’t read many things during the day. I would rather write all day, but frequently the fullness of a thought, of an expression, of something that comes out of myself in a tumultuous way—let’s label it with an antiquated term, ‘inspiration’—leaves me satisfied, or exhausted, or calmed, or empty. That is, I can’t go on.
— Pablo Neruda, The Art of Poetry No. 14 (interview by Rita Guibert; translated by Ronald Christ), The Paris Review
Rita Guibert: Do you always write everything in longhand?
Pablo Neruda: Ever since I had an accident in which I broke a finger and couldn’t use the typewriter for a few months, I have followed the custom of my youth and gone back to writing by hand. I discovered when my finger was better and I could type again that my poetry when written by hand was more sensitive; its plastic forms could change more easily. In an interview, Robert Graves says that in order to think one should have as little as possible around that is not handmade. He could have added that poetry ought to be written by hand. The typewriter separated me from a deeper intimacy with poetry, and my hand brought me closer to that intimacy again.
— The Art of Poetry No. 14 (an interview with Pablo Neruda by Rita Guibert; translated by Ronald Christ), The Paris Review
“I always wrote out of internal necessity, and I imagine that this is what happens with all writers, poets especially.”
— Pablo Neruda, The Art of Poetry No. 14 (interview by Rita Guibert; translated by Ronald Christ), The Paris Review
