I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems… Possibilities I prefer movies. I prefer cats. I prefer the oaks along the Warta. I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky. I prefer myself liking people to myself loving mankind. I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case. I…
Category: Reading to write
Ars Poetica V (personal lyric)
I found this book which I had left unfinished. And started re-reading: … for a poem to move us it must bring us near our own threshold. We must feel genuinely threatened or destabilized by the poem’s vision of disordering, even as we are simultaneously reassured and convinced by its orderings Gregory Orr: Poetry as Survival…
chores: an excuse for not doing more important stuff
I read this interesting presentation of Svetlana Lilova’s : Metaphysical Dictionary (2016) over at Caroline’s a few days ago. Metaphysical Dictionary is a collection of “sort-of-poems” with illustrations by Graham Falk. I say “sort-of-poems” because, as the title tells us, this is also a dictionary – and as a dictionary; a rather untraditional & personal one. If everyone chose to write…
Recharge
I’m on holiday (=recharging) …; using An Absorbing Errand by Janna Malamud Smith as a guide back into the world of creativity. True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one’s self; but the Point is not only to get out — you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand. Henry James from…
Live the questions …
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point…
Funny is the New Deep
In Brooklyn gaining new insights on writing … “Writers in early stages … tend to look down upon the comic impulse”, says Almond, and I think he is right. Writers are afraid of not being taken serious. But the thing is: Comedy is not stupid, it is – maybe – the best way to connect…
Sea-change
How to write about nature in a way that makes the reader feel the landscape as if she was there; wandering through it … absorbed, possessed – ? Here is Jean Sprackland: Countless times I’ve seen the shore hewn and hammered, scattered with whole tree trunks, steel pipes, oil drums, concrete fence posts, dead sheep….
A talent for concealment and revelation
A breeze was blowing, and I could smell salt, seaweed, and sun-bleached shore. I knew, once again, that I’d found home. –Sue Hubbell, Waiting for Aphrodite I never tire of the coast because it’s never the same twice. The tides and the weather change its physical shape, and they bring different things to look at….
It is hard to drop from the self into the soul
From “The Edge of the Frame”, by Tony Hoagland (an excerpt) Joseph Cornell collected souvenirs of places he was miserable in, which pretty much was everywhere he went. Churchill felt afraid on stairs. Terrible migraines of Virginia Woolf entered her skull and would not be evicted. I read biographies because I want to…
On Grace
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God. — Aeschylus
sub rosa 