I used to be a writer, these days I prefer paint. But the thing is — the two have more in common than I imagine. For the maker it’s all about the process … “I began my diary exercises without a plan, aware that in literature you don’t start because you have something to write…
Tag: the Paris Review
Sunday poem on a Tuesday
Lying in a Hammock at a Friend’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, Asleep on the black trunk, Blowing like a leaf in green shadow. Down the ravine behind Duffy’s empty house, The cowbells follow one another Into the distances of the afternoon. To my right, In…
Sunday Poem
Things to Think by Robert Bly Think in ways you’ve never thought before. If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message Larger than anything you’ve ever heard, Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats. Think that someone may bring a bear to your door, Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a…
Lament
Mourning for Paris – and for us all – I turn once again to Jan Zwicky, looking for hope in dark times … Prelude There is, said Pythagoras, a sound the planet makes: a kind of music just outside our hearing, the proportion and the resonance of things – not the clang of theory or the…
in print
Ved å la det grusomme og det vakre gå hånd i hånd, setter Richard Mosse betrakterens etikk og moral på prøve. REVIEW – IN NORWEGIAN
apropos putting things into words –
Aquabob, clinkerbell, daggler, cancervell, ickle, tankle, shuckle, crottle, doofers, honeyfur, zawn … The English language used to be a rich language, full of vivid, precise words to describe the landscape and natural phenomena. But where are these words nowadays? According to Robert Macfarlane we have not kept up with developing this side of our language, on the contrary we…
poetry is anxiety
A. R. Ammons, The Art of Poetry No. 73, Interviewed by David Lehman, © 2013 THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWER Does inspiration originate in nature, in external reality, or in the self? A. R. AMMONS I think it comes from anxiety. That is to say, either the mind or the body is already rather highly charged…
Radial Symmetry
Today I’m reading Katherine Larson, it’s an extraordinary experience! The first poem in her collection is called Statuary, it goes like this: . The late cranes throwing their necks to the wind stay somewhere between the place that rain begins and the place that it ends they seem to exist just there above the horizon…
The best poetry-writing teacher
Lectures on poetry & writing by Richard Hugo (cont.) When Roethke read his favorites aloud (Yeats, Hopkins, Auden, …) the students could feel themselves falling in love with the sounds of the words. He gave students a love of the sound of language. His classes were clinics. He performed therapy on the ear. Self-Portrait With…
Finish the poem first, then worry, if you have to, about being right or sane
Lectures on poetry & writing by Richard Hugo (cont.) Assumptions lie behind the work of all writers. Words love the ridicules areas of our minds. It is important that a poet not question her assumptions, at least not in the middle of composition. Finish the poem first, then worry, if you have to, about being right…
sub rosa 