Monday Morning Quote: Maxine Kumin on Writing about Family

... I do edit and self-censor my work to keep from crossing certain boundaries of privacy and decorum. I am fond of saying to fearful students who turn in poems about family members, "Now that you have made art of it, it belongs to the ages." But of course there are matters of taste and tact. Sometimes just putting a searing poem away for a few days, months, or years will solve the problem. Sometimes, as you "await the birth-hour of a new clarity," as Rilke advised Mr. Kappus, a path around the emotional obstacle will appear. And eventually, truly, it will belong to the ages.

—Maxine Kiumin, Always Beginning

Monday Morning Quote: Kim Addonizio on Demons

Your demons are there to be used an overcome, and in this sense they are ultimately helpful. Did you think writing great, or even good, poems would be easy? What feeling of accomplishment would you get from doing what is easy, what anyone can do without trying? Athletes train relentlessly to beome stronger, faster, better. Dancers attend class every day and rehearse long hours in the studio. Actors memorize thousands of words and then practice saying them over and over to inhabit their characters. If you thought poetry was different, this is your wake-up call. Poetry is a bitch. It wants your energy, your intelligence, your spirit, your time. No wonder you want to avoid it. I know I sometimes do. But the only way past, as I read somewhere, is through. Put your ass in the chair (or the bed), and get started.

Once you do that, other demons will show up.

—Kim Addonizio, Ordinary Genius

The Final Top 10 for 2011

The Grief of Others, by Leah Hager Cohen

Middlemarch, by George Eliot

The Art of Fielding, by Chad Harbach

All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, by Lan Samantha Chang

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot

Speculation, by Edmund Jorgensen

Ysabel, by Guy Gavriel Kay

Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, by Mark Doty

The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes

A Scientific Romance, by Ronald Wright

A watershed year, I think, in my reading life as in 2011 80% of the books in my final top ten were read on one or another eReader. The other two, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon and A Scientific Romance, were not available in eBook form at the time I started them. I miss some things about print, but not as much as I expected—and now that I've switched to the Google eReader, which does a much better job of giving you a sense of where you are in the book (page numbers, how radical!) I miss them less. Still not a good choice for poetry, I think, but overall it's convenient and the house is (slightly) less messy.

This year I'm also finally walking the buy-local walk. All links here and in the book lists on the right now take you to the IndieBound web site, where you can search for the books at a local independent bookstore near you. Although I still buy plenty of stuff from Amazon, I'm buying my books elsewhere.

Monday Morning Quote: Wislawa Szymborska

[A]t the very core of every poem, there is emotion. What you have to do is fight against this emotion. If you were to use emotions only it would be enough to say: 'I love you. Full stop. Don't leave me. What shall I do without you? Oh my poor country! Oh my poor homeland!'

—Wislawa Szymborska, who died earlier this month,
in an interview in The Guardian

Monday Morning Quote: Jeffery Levine on Craft Annotations

[T]he idea behind craft annotations is to learn by close examination and informal analysis just what’s going on inside poems written by others. We hold the pen in our hand as we walk and talk our way through a poem, while trying to pay close attention to just one or two elements of the poet’s craft. We ask ourselves, just how does the poet make this or that transcendence happen on the page? The idea is to become a poetry explorer, and as befits and benefits the role of the explorer, to make discoveries that we can then claim for ourselves – both for our own enlightenment (what are some of the ways in which this poet makes that poem effective?) and for our own use: now how can I employ these elements of craft – these tools from the poet’s tool belt – in order to write better poems?

...Let me say that I’ve always found it helpful when annotating a poem to write the thing out, longhand. There’s no better way to get a tactile feel for what’s going on in a poem.

—Jeffrey Levine, Making Better Poems, Part II — with sample annotations

This series of blog posts by the editor-in-chief of Tupelo Press has been incredibly helpful reading for me—especially as I am just starting to write craft annotations myself—and I recommend it to you highly.