Ars Poetica V (personal lyric, cont.) Speech is among the most fundamental ways we have to connecting our selves to other selves. This is what Gregory Orr can tell us about silence & suffering There are silences that are positive and powerful and willed by the self, but many silences have a destructive origin and destructive…
Tag: creative writing
towards effortless writing
I’ve just read Dorothea Brande’s short & brilliant book Becoming a Writer. It was first published in 1934, but except for her advises on portable type writers …, it is really up to date. Here is an advise on how to write Morning Pages … (before Julia Cameron came to name them so) …. if…
A Common Reader
I am taking Virginia Woolf’s Common Reader as a model for my new writing project. I am studying her way of writing, her method. You all know she is unattainable, belonging to a different sphere, so she will be more like my leading star. Nevertheless, I will try very hard to make my texts readable for the…
craft is what releases art
Today I’m quoting Richard Gilbert, who has written an excellent text called: CONTENT + CRAFT = ART you should read it all – all of you! Here are a few samples to give you an idea what it’s all about: Craft is what releases art Art announces itself in form While talent is common [sic!], the…
extraordinary books on writing – part two
Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life First I listened to Word by Word, then to the audiobook version of Bird by Bird, and today I’m reading Bird by Bird on my iPad. Why? Because I got kind of hooked. Because Anne Lamott writes and talks exceedingly well about writing. Because…
Why I Write
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: I write to make peace with the things I cannot control. I write to create fabric in a world that often appears black and white. I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. … … I write to honor beauty … So many good reasons…
Writing is what we do in the world –
– and as ephemeral as it might sometimes seem, the making of poems is a necessary act, one that allies itself with hope rather than despair. In my ongoing search for justification, vindication, or to put it blunt: permission to write, I just stumbled across some very wise words by Gregory Orr: As a poet,…
Let’s talk about life –
We tell ourselves stories in order to live, or to justify taking lives, even our own, by violence or numbness and the failure to live; tell ourselves stories that save us and stories that are the quicksand in which we thrash and the well in which we drown, … Sometimes the story collapses, and it…
how to (not) write poetry
not everything written in lines is a poem
Wrapping up
What I like best with Dobyns’ essay Deception is its simple and direct style. His text is easy accessible, easy to understand and agree or disagree with. Nothing fancy, no profound bottomlessness which so often is the case in contemporary literary theory. Deception is talking directly to me as a reader and writer, not hiding…
sub rosa 