“[P]oetry… is a deliberate attempt to refocus our attention on daily happenings and their extraordinary dimensions or character.”
— Michael Fishbane, Sacred Attunement: A Jewish Theology (via hours)
“I know from my own experience that learning how to read deeply — and that means diverse and sometimes difficult texts — trains your brain and improves your sense of self. Learning how to write, even reasonably well, gives fluency to the rest of life.”
— Jeanette Winterson, Jeanette Winterson: teaching creative writing, The Guardian
“Writing should be personal but not insular. If we are not readers we cannot be writers. Reading widely is necessary. A course that encourages students to read outside their own interests will expand what they have to say.”
— Jeanette Winterson, Jeanette Winterson: teaching creative writing, The Guardian
“Displacement has always been there in my work. The feeling of not-being-at-home. The quarrel with the self and where one is. In a sense, displacement is what makes writing possible and necessary. Moving from one place to another, adopting different positions of seeing and being.”
— Boey Kim Cheng, A Sense of Questing: Kim Cheng Boey on Poetry (an interview with Boey Kim Cheng by Desmond Zhicheng-Mingdé Kon)
“No poem is about one of us, or some of us, but is about all of us. It is part of a long document about the species. Every poem is about my life but also it is about your life, and a hundred thousand lives to come. That one person wrote it is not nearly so important or so interesting as that it pertains to us all.”
— Mary Oliver, Blue Pastures
“The most regretful people on Earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
— Mary Oliver, Blue Pastures
“In creative work—creative work of all kinds—those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.”
— Mary Oliver, Blue Pastures
“I want to love people so much that I work myself to the bone for their qualitative betterment. I should be interested in raising people up, not just their standards. The first being done, the second can surely come. I want to serve all people by enriching them, by taking them higher. And I want to take what they already have, honoring it because they made it. I want to take what they are—my loved neighbors—and give them the best of what I know and have. I also want them to know that my artistic journey is nowhere near complete and that I too must be taken higher by those above me who continue to teach me.”
— Harold M. Best, Unceasing Worship: Biblical Perspectives on Worship and the Arts (via schizophreniatic)
“I’m trying to tell stories only I can tell.”
— Sarah Kay, Sarah Kay: If I should have a daughter …, TED
“You have to grow and explore and take risks and challenge yourself… . [You have to] infus[e] the work you’re doing with the specific things that make you you, even while those things are always changing.”
— Sarah Kay, Sarah Kay: If I should have a daughter …, TED
“I know that the number one rule to being cool is to seem unfazed, to never admit that anything scares you or impresses you or excites you. Somebody once told me it’s like walking through life like this [with arms raised in a guarded position]. You protect yourself from all the unexpected miseries or hurt that might show up. But I try to walk through life like this [with open palms]. And yes, that means catching all of those miseries and hurt, but it also means that when beautiful, amazing things just fall out of the sky, I am ready to catch them. I use spoken word [poetry] to help my students rediscover wonder, to fight their instincts to be cool and unfazed and, instead, actively pursue being engaged with what goes on around them, so that they can reinterpret and create something from it.”
— Sarah Kay, Sarah Kay: If I should have a daughter …, TED
“[I]t turns out sometimes, poetry can be really scary. Turns out sometimes, you have to trick teenagers into writing poetry. So I came up with lists. Everyone can write lists. And the first list that I assign is ‘10 Things I Know to be True.’ And here’s what happens, and here’s what you would discover, too, if we all started sharing our lists out loud. At a certain point, you would realize that someone has the exact same thing, or one thing very similar, to something on your list. And then someone else has something the complete opposite of yours. Third, someone has something you’ve never even heard of before. And fourth, someone has something you thought you knew everything about, but they’re introducing a new angle of looking at it. And I tell people that this is where great stories start from — these four intersections of what you’re passionate about and what others might be invested in.”
— Sarah Kay, Sarah Kay: If I should have a daughter …, TED
“I realized that I didn’t have to write poems that were indignant, if that’s not what I was. There were things that were specific to me, and the more that I focused on those things, the weirder my poetry got, but the more that it felt like mine. It’s not just the adage, ‘Write what you know.’ It’s about gathering up all of the knowledge and experience you’ve collected up to now to help you dive into the things you don’t know. I use poetry to help me work through what I don’t understand, but I show up to each new poem with a backpack full of everywhere else that I’ve been.”
— Sarah Kay, Sarah Kay: If I should have a daughter …, TED
“I write poems to figure things out. Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing a poem. And sometimes I get to the end of the poem and look back and go, ‘Oh, that’s what this is all about,’ and sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven’t solved anything, but at least I have a new poem out of it.”
— Sarah Kay, Sarah Kay: If I should have a daughter …, TED
“Fiction finished has to bear the responsibility of its own meaning, it is its own memory. It is now a thing apart from the writer; like a letter mailed, it is nearer by now to its reader. If the writer has had luck, it has something of its own to travel on, something that can make it persist for a while, an identity, before it must fade.”
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
