May 2012
4 posts
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“[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)
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“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
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“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
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“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...
April 2012
15 posts
2 tags
“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
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“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
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“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
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“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...
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“I’m trying to tell stories only I can tell.”
— Sarah Kay, Sarah Kay: If I should have a daughter …, TED
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“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
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“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]....
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“[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...
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“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...
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“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...
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“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
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“Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another’s work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to, and to ask: is it valid?”
— Eudora Welty, On...
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“Only the writing of fiction keeps fiction alive. Regardless of whether or not it is reading that gives writing birth, a society that no longer writes novels is not very likely to read any novels at all.”
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
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“The printed, bound and paid-for book… is the site of an encounter, in silence, of two minds, one following in the other’s steps but invited to imagine, to argue, to concur on a level of reflection beyond that of personal encounter, with all its merely social conventions, its merciful padding of blather and mutual forgiveness.”
— John Updike, The End of Authorship, The New...
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“[T]he novel ought to be a stout defender of the independence of eschatology in its most robust sense—that is a defender of the apparently obvious but actually quite vulnerable conviction that the present does not possess the future. Whether or not we say, as earlier believers in eschatology would have done, that God is in possession of the future, the one thing we can agree on is that we...
March 2012
31 posts
6 tags
“Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look. The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn’t require his attention.”
— Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose...
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“[I]n literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
— C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
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“A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions. I don’t know whether my nation will perish and I don’t know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything....
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“A novel is a long piece of synthetic prose based on play with invented characters. These are the only limits. By the term synthetic I have in mind the novelist’s desire to grasp his subject from all sides and in the fullest possible completeness. Ironic essay, novelistic narrative, autobiographical fragment, historic fact, flight of fantasy—the synthetic power of the novel is capable...
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“I am enormously fond of French culture and I am greatly indebted to it. Especially to the older literature. Rebelais is dearest to me of all writers. And Diderot. I love his Jacques le fataliste as much as I do Laurence Sterne. Those were the greatest experimenters of all time in the form of the novel. And their experiments were, so to say, amusing, full of happiness and joy, which have by...
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“For a writer, the experience of living in a number of countries is an enormous boon. You can only understand the world if you see it from several sides.”
— Milan Kundera, “Milan Kundera” (an interview with Milan Kundera by Philip Roth, 1980; translated by Peter Kussi), Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work by Philip Roth
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“[T]he pure act of writing – the truth that it is still there for you and you for it – is a wonder. And it need have nothing to do with the details of your life. Within it, you can be away from everything and saying out new dreams, just because you can, because human beings do sing for other human beings and make unnecessary beauties.”
— AL Kennedy, Putting everything into writing,...
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“[N]ewer writers… need encouragement and kindness as well as discipline and interior fury.”
— AL Kennedy, Putting everything into writing, The Guardian
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“Although I learn very slowly and change more slowly still, I have one very beautiful thing in my favour – I write, I do something creative. This means that when all is darkness, it isn’t. It can’t be. The way of life I have chosen allows me to take – sometimes quickly, sometimes not – any negative element and use it, change it at some level.”
— AL Kennedy, Putting...
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“Our inward life of pure time is sluggish or fast-flowing depending on our rate of conductivity. Just as certain metals and alloys when suitably cooled conduct electricity without generating any heat, and therefore without generating any heat, and therefore without losing any of the energy they are carrying, so certain people may be superconductors for time. As well as experiencing time as...
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“[I]t’s important not to fall in love with your own ideas… so I would say there [are] some works that were important—transitional works—works to get to the next place, but the works [are] only as valuable as [they mean]. And there’re other works where [there are] other kinds of discoveries—you discover something. I do believe that there is no place to start any work…...
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“Talk of the mystical properties of poetry dates from the beginnings of human memory. Though inexplicable, this can be explained on a rational level of understanding: poetry is not rational. On the prosodic level the poet’s dictionary reveals language as dance and flight, flight as soaring aloft and flight as escape. The common graphic symbol of poetry is the winged horse. The epic...
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“Everyone knows that the ancient name poet means maker or author. ‘To make’ means to fabricate or put together. What are the materials, the materia poetica, which the poet uses? Consult the poet’s dictionary. But note that these materials are largely immaterial, spiritual, psychological, that they do not require stone, earth, wood, pigment, or iron, but only words...
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“Most poets in maturity are happy to limit their craftsmanship to the single voice they have developed over the years (Robert Frost, for example). It is this voice that is the identification card of the poet. No greater compliment can be paid to the poet than this kind of recognition, as when one says of a newly found anonymous poem, ‘This is a Roethke poem’ or ‘This is a...
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“Unfortunately, moral beauty in art—like physical beauty in a person—is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.”
— Susan Sontag, “Camus’ Notebooks,” Against Interpretation: and Other Essays (via hours)
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“I suppose I could say, without fear of contradicting myself later, that writing poetry is one way I have of coming to grips with both inner and external realities. I also think of my writing as a form of prayer—a prayer for illumination, perfection.”
— Robert Hayden, “The Poet and His Art: A Conversation” (interview by Paul McCluskey), Collected Prose (edited by Frederick...
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Hector Torres: This listening, this waiting for [of your writing process], does this demand a certain practice from you, a daily routine?
Richard Rodriguez: Yes, constantly. It is as close as I come to prayer. In fact, Thomas Aquinas says that writing is a form of prayer, and I hope he’s right, because when you’re really good at being a writer, you’re really good at listening....
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“[S]tyle is a kind of openness to the world.”
— Richard Rodriguez, “Richard Rodriguez: I Don’t Think I Exist” (interview by Hector A. Torres), Conversations with Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Writers by Hector A. Torres
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“I realized that all I have to do as a writer is just accept the world as it is given to me. This, the world I have, this is what I know. This is the drama that I deal with, and I can’t write about anything else. I have to listen to the way that drama structures itself within my soul. That’s all my style is.”
— Richard Rodriguez, “Richard Rodriguez: I Don’t...
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Hector Torres: How do you define style for yourself?
Richard Rodriguez: There was a great architect called Louis Kahn, a wonderful modernist architect. He had on staff at his architectural firm in Philadelphia a kind of guru or a mystic or something. This guy used to go with him—I think he was Buddhist—to these architectural sites where they were going to build the building, whether it was in...
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“Writing is a form of prayer. It’s a way to explore your deepest selves. And I do mean selves. I’ve made the acquaintance of my many selves. The selves have to be knitted together. It’s what makes a person whole. When you absorb all your selves, you affirm yourself. You become weller and weller.”
— Alice Walker, “Alice Walker: on heroines” (interview by...
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“‘Writing is a form of prayer.’ Auden refers to this thought of Kafka to explain his decision to destroy everything he had written. ‘Anyone who truly addresses his prayers to God does not want others to hear them.’
A brilliant but strained interpretation, yet the wisdom of Kafka’s observation remains. Every authentic piece of writing ultimately takes the form...
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“Poetry is only a means of maturation for me. That’s why I’m not even ashamed of weaker poems. They are stages, a passageway, a self-definition.”
— Anna Kamieńska, “Diary Entries” (translated by Alissa Valles), Polish Writers on Writing (edited by Adam Zagajewski)
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“Poetry should train itself in prayer. Poetry should turn to a destination that is always farther than man. It’s like a principle of spiritual dynamics, that a spiritual effort has to aim higher than the goal.
When poetry addresses itself only to the so-called ordinary man, it immediately withers and dries. Poetry seeks higher reasons for the human world, in the olden days one would...
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Nicholas O’Connell: Did your understanding of poetic inspiration help to imagine what it would be like to have religious faith?
Denise Levertov: That’s one way of putting it. When you’re really caught up in writing a poem, it can be a form of prayer. I’m not very good at praying, but what I experience when I’m writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different...
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Nicholas O’Connell: How do you get the second draft?
Denise Levertov: Well, it depends. I might see that the punctuation isn’t right, or the line break isn’t quite right, or I may want to add or subtract something. If you copy something out by hand, before you move onto the typewriter, you’ve already gone on making minor changes. This is an intuitive part of the creative...
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“I think a poet has a vocation to deal with language, not to deal with politics or sort of soapbox issues.”
— Carol Ann Duffy, Bookclub: Carol Ann Duffy, 5 Dec 2004, (interview by James Naughtie), BBC Radio 4
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Jenni Murray: I understand that you’re not a religious person, unlike some previous laureates, but you did say once that you regard a poem as a kind of prayer. What did you mean by that?
Carol Ann Duffy: Well, I suppose my parents were Catholic, so my early memories are of in fact the Latin mass, the kind of music of that, the litany of that, and going to Catholic schools and convents,...
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“[P]oetry, if you like, makes its own occasions. A poem will occur if there’s a genuine beginning to a poem that can come from memory or imagination or a public event. It can come from the language itself, an odd combination of words that provoke a poem.”
— Carol Ann Duffy, Woman’s Hour: 01/05/2009 (interview by Jenni Murray), BBC Radio 4
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“I think poetry’s all about imagination, about looking at the ordinary and transforming it. It almost has a Midas touch.”
— Carol Ann Duffy, Woman’s Hour: 01/05/2009 (interview by Jenni Murray), BBC Radio 4