February 2012
65 posts
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“I don’t know that poetry has any duty. For me poetry is the music of being human.”
— Carol Ann Duffy, quoted in Cuts and hedge fund deal dominate TS Eliot prize by Channel 4 News, Channel 4 News
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“You do not write the best you can for the sake of art, but for the sake of returning your talent increased to the invisible God to use or not use as he sees fit.”
— Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor (selected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald) (via invisibleforeigner)
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“Poetry’s all around us; it’s in songs, it’s in speech, it’s on the page, it can accidentally happen in conversation. And I hope to continue to demonstrate that as a vocational poet, perhaps to indicate where poetry can be found in the everyday.”
— Carol Ann Duffy, speaking to Charlotte Higgins on accepting the role of poet laureate, The Guardian
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“I think lyric poetry originally is, perhaps is by Sappho, was sung, sung to the lyre; that’s how we have the word ‘lyric.’ Sappho was probably the first poet who sang of the personal rather than of the gods, of the histories. And I think that music, that personal music, that Sappho, and those after her, sang, and then wrote, is still very deep in our English poetry. We do...
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“I would find it difficult to write any poem that wasn’t genuinely invented in language, that wasn’t coming from memory, or imagination, or the impact of a personal or public event upon me. I have to wait for poems to come, as any poet does.”
— Carol Ann Duffy, speaking to Charlotte Higgins on accepting the role of poet laureate, The Guardian
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“I want the reader to bring themselves to the poems, not be wondering about me. If a poem endures, the life is between the reader and the poem. The poet should not be in the way.”
— Carol Ann Duffy, quoted in Carol Ann Duffy by Jeanette Winterson, Jeanette Winterson
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“Male novelists and dramatists are getting very documentary now, aren’t they? As though that is somehow more serious. Poetry can’t be documentary. I’m not sure that any of the arts should be — but poetry, above all, is a series of intense moments — its power is not in narrative. I’m not dealing with facts, I’m dealing with emotion.”
— Carol Ann Duffy,...
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“One of the prime achievements in every good fiction has nothing to do with truth or philosophy or a Weltanschauung at all. It is the triumphant adjustment of two different kinds of order. On the one hand, the events (the mere plot) have their chronological and causal order, that which they would have in real life. On the other, all the scenes or other divisions of the work must be related to each...
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“The great artist—or at all events the great literary artist—cannot be a man shallow either in his thoughts or his feelings. However improbable and abnormal a story he has chosen, it will, as we say, ‘come to life’ in his hands. The life to which it comes will be impregnated with all the wisdom, knowledge and experience the author has; and even more by something which I can only...
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“[T]he writer should be not just a chronicler but also a shaper, an alchemist, of historical experiences.”
— Ha Jin, The Writer as Migrant
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“[T]o preserve is the key function of literature, which, to combat historical amnesia, must be predicated on the autonomy and integrity of literary works inviolable by time.”
— Ha Jin, The Writer as Migrant
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“[F]or whom does the writer speak? Of course not just for himself. Then, for a group? For those who are not listened to? There is no argument that the writer must take a moral stand and speak against oppression, prejudice, and injustice, but such a gesture must be secondary, and he should be aware of the limits of his art as social struggle. His real battlefield is nowhere but on the page....
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“Writers do not make good generals, and today literature is ineffective at social change. All the writer can strive for is a personal voice.”
— Ha Jin, The Writer as Migrant
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“[A] writer’s first responsibility is to write well. His social role is only secondary, mostly given by the forces around him, and it has little to do with his value as a writer.”
— Ha Jin, The Writer as Migrant
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“[V. S.] Naipaul in his essay ‘Two Worlds’ [in Literary Occasions] speaks about the necessity of maintaining the distinction between the writer as a social being and the writer who writes. He quotes from Proust’s early book Against Sainte-Beuve to argue that the self who writes a book is not the same as the person who exists in everyday life.”
— Ha Jin, The Writer as...
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“[M]ost collective experiences and personal stories have no lasting significance unless they are transformed and preserved in art.”
— Ha Jin, The Writer as Migrant
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“At the outset of his career, a writer often wrestles with the Aristotelian questions—to whom, as whom, and in whose interest does he write? His answers to those questions will shape his vision and help determine his subject matter and even his style of writing. Among the three questions, ‘as whom does he write’ is the most troublesome one, because it involves the writer’s...
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“I have found that writing is the way I most easily pray. In seeking to formulate truth in words, I search deep into the heart of the God of Jesus Christ in a way others do in silence or service or solitude.”
— Samuel Wells, Power and Passion: Six Characters in Search of Resurrection (via invisibleforeigner)
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VANESSA: Your aunt’s a very lucky woman, Angelica, because she has two lives. Most of us have only one. But she has the life she leads and she also has the book she’s writing. This makes her very fortunate indeed.
— David Hare, The Hours
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“[Y]ou cannot apply a political agenda to art. When it comes to art, we have to make other distinctions.”
— Camille Paglia, “The M.I.T. Lecture: Crisis in the American Universities,” Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays (via schizophreniatic)
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“What’s the poet’s place in a world of prose? This was essentially Wordsworth’s question in his preface to the Lyrical Ballads. The idea was to integrate extraordinary events of the mind into the everyday and so to redeem the everyday from its banality. The poet’s task is to mediate between the banal and the transcendental—temporality redeemed by its spots. That the...
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“A poetic universe is, philosophically speaking, a universe of correspondences. In a poetic universe, every fragment is a luminous detail. It resonates with the super-sensuous. It is in perpetual transport from the everydayness of its material appearance to the sphere of the transcendental where it is really located, and its impact upon consciousness constitutes a moment of vision or the...
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“What I want to describe in my poems is the nudge, the prick of the instant, the flame of appreciation that shoots from my heels to my head when compass grass bends its frilled branches and draws a perfect circle on the cold sand; or when the yellow wasp comes, in fall, to my wrist and then to my plate, to ramble the edges of a smear of honey.
There is nothing so special in this, I know. Neither...
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“What I write begins and ends with the act of noticing and cherishing, and it neither begins nor ends with the human world.”
— Mary Oliver, “Winter Hours,” Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
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“I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple. Under the trees, along the pale slopes of sand, I walk in an ascendant relationship to rapture, and with words I celebrate this rapture. I see, and dote upon, the manifest.”
— Mary Oliver, “Winter Hours,” Winter Hours: Prose, Prose...
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“Morning, for me, is the time of best work. My conscious thought sings like a bird in a cage, but the rest of me is singing too, like a bird in the wind. Perhaps something is still strong in us in the morning, the part that is untamable, that dreams willfully and crazily, that knows reason is no more than an island within us.
In the act of writing the poem, I am obedient, and submissive....
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“[A]fter I gave a reading recently, and read many poems from the book [Different Hours], a poet came up to me afterward, shook my hand, and said, ‘Mortality: a poet’s best friend.’”
— Stephen Dunn, Poet of Restraint and Extravagance: A Conversation with Stephen Dunn (an interview with Stephen Dunn by Nightsun), Nightsun 20 (2 Mar. 2000)
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“It seems to me a good poem is a very hard thing to write. If you believe that and also have models of excellence in your memory to prove it, you are always tempted to come back to your poem and see if you can make it a little better. At some point, as Auden says, you abandon it, you must leave it alone. Yet, anybody who has written, who is serious, will tell you how many times they’ve...
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“I think it’s really important to go to your room and sit there. I couldn’t mean that more seriously. The amateur writer only writes when something big happens in his or her life. Unless you have a better life than I do, you would write only three or four poems a year. So you go to your room and you wait for something to happen. You do that regularly.”
— Stephen Dunn, Poet...
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“My barometer for myself is that I’m not even in my poem until the first moment I’ve startled myself. Usually if I’m wise that day I throw away everything that precedes that moment. I’m interested in my life, of course, but when I write poetry I’m not interested in my life, per se. I’m interested in using it to talk about concerns of mine, perhaps ones I...
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“One of the things that I despair about with my students, say, is that those of them who read at all, don’t read much beyond their major area of study. I love, for example, this last semester when I had a young man in class who was a physics major. He brought a lot to the table; he was more serious than my other students perhaps because he had read a lot about science and history. I...
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“The best reason to tell students not to use abstract ideas in their poems is because they have probably little familiarity with the history of ideas. Their startling idea is often somebody else’s old news. I think in order to even engage the notion of ideas you must have some sense of the history of ideas and even then they need to be couched in situations, the more emotional the...
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“One of my methods… is to be dialectical, that is, as soon as I find myself saying something that sounds smart I tend to resist it. I think that comes out of a philosophical predisposition more than anything else. No matter what I say, I almost always hear the opposite immediately. If I find myself saying something that seems to hold up, that has the pretension of wisdom, I’ve...
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“As a young man, William Carlos Williams posited, ‘no ideas but in things,’ which had its usefulness. As an older man, he entirely violated his dictum. I think that our best poets will not restrict themselves to even their best ideas.”
— Stephen Dunn, Poet of Restraint and Extravagance: A Conversation with Stephen Dunn (an interview with Stephen Dunn by Nightsun), Nightsun...
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“You need to let your poems get away from you a little so that they may find themselves. Richard Hugo talks about this—that if we are still singularly in love with our initiating subject, our triggering subject, by the end of the poem, we’ve probably written a bad poem. If you haven’t developed different allegiances in the act of composition to language, texture, tone, if...
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“You want your form to harness and reveal content. That’s restraint at its best.”
— Stephen Dunn, Poet of Restraint and Extravagance: A Conversation with Stephen Dunn (an interview with Stephen Dunn by Nightsun), Nightsun 20 (2 Mar. 2000)
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“Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death.”
— Mary Oliver, “Sand Dabs, Six,” Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
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“As a carpenter can make a gibbet as well as an altar, a writer can describe the world as trivial or exquisite, as material or as idea, as senseless or as purposeful. Words are wood.”
— Mary Oliver, “Sand Dabs, Six,” Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
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“I am a performing artist; I perform admiration. Come with me, I want my poems to say. And do the same.”
— Mary Oliver, “Sand Dabs, Five,” Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
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“It is supposed that a writer writes what he knows about and knows well. It is not necessarily so. A writer’s subject may just as well, if not more likely, be what the writer longs for and dreams about, in an unquenchable dream, in lush detail and harsh honesty.”
— Mary Oliver, “Some Thoughts on Whitman,” Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
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“In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James offers four marks of distinction that are part of a mystical experience. The first of these is that such an experience ‘defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.’
All poets know such frustration generally; the goal of creative work is ever approachable yet unattainable. But [Walt]...
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“[E]very poem, from [Christopher] Smart’s ‘Jubilate Agno’ to [John] Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ is both experience and fabrication.”
— Mary Oliver, “A Man Named Frost,” Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems
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“[S]eeing is so important in th[e] work [of writing]. Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new. Seeing is as much the job of an historian as it is of a poet or a painter, it seems to me. That’s Dickens’s great admonition to all writers, ‘Make me...
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“I think it’s far more important to write well than most people realize. Writing doesn’t just communicate ideas; it generates them. If you’re bad at writing and don’t like to do it, you’ll miss out on most of the ideas writing would have generated.
As for how to write well, here’s the short version: Write a bad version 1 as fast as you can; rewrite it...
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“[I]nvite the reader to want to do something beyond merely receiving beauty, and to configure in his or her own mind what that might be. Make sure there is nothing in the poem that would keep the reader from becoming the speaker of the poem… . The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy...
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“Years ago I set three ‘rules’ for myself. Every poem I write, I said, must have a genuine body, it must have sincere energy, and it must have a spiritual purpose. If a poem to my mind failed any one of these categories it was rebuked and redone, or discarded. Over the forty or so years during which writing poems has been my primary activity, I have added other admonitions and...
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“For anyone, stepping away from actions where one knows one’s measure is good. It shakes away an excess of seriousness. Building my house, or anything else, I always felt myself becoming, in an almost devotional sense, passive, and willing to play. Play is never far from the impress of the creative drive, never far from the happiness of discovery. Building my house, I was joyous all...
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“The labor of writing poems, of working with thought and emotion in the encasement (or is it the wings?) of language, is strange to nature, for we are first of all creatures of motion. Only secondly—only oddly, and not naturally, at moments of contemplation, joy, grief, prayer, or terror—are we found, while awake, in the posture of deliberate or hapless inaction. But such is the posture of...
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“I know a young man who can build almost anything—a boat, a fence, kitchen cabinets, a table, a barn, a house. And so serenely, and in so assured and right a manner, that it is joy to watch him. All the same, what he seems to care for best—what he seems positively to desire—is the hour of interruption, of hammerless quiet, in which he will sit and write down poems or stories that have come...
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“Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can re-align chaos to suggest both the chaos and the order it will become.”
— Judith Mara Gutman, “Lewis W. Hine and the American Social Conscience”