Monday, August 30, 2010

Monday Morning Quote: Martina Navratilova on What Champions Need

PARADE: What did you ... have that champions need?

Martina: I think the ability to fail. Not being afraid to put it all on the line and come up short. Most people don't have that.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Monday Morning Quote: Steve Almond on What Art Does

As a broad working definition, art awakens feeling.... That is what songs do, even dumb pop songs: they remind us that emotions are not an inconvenient and vaguely embarrassing aspect of the human enterprise but its central purpose.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

A Recent Conversation...

... while walking Lily Beth in the Middlesex Fells:
Ben: You're pretty.

KT: I'm hungry, I have to pee, and I feel dizzy.

Ben: Well, it becomes you.
That's it—our relationship in a nutshell.

Monday, August 9, 2010

Monday Morning Quote: Peter Elbow on Poetry and Rules

Robert Frost said that writing poetry without rhyme is like playing tennis without a net. And that having to rhyme helped him to think of words and even ideas.... Consider the writing of a poem as the playing of a game, getting the ball through a hoop, a technical problem to be solved. It may seem very unpoetic but it leads to better luck with poems.

What you need for writing poems then is some interesting games to play, that is, some interesting rules you must obey. Allen Tate once described a poet as someone "willing to come under the bondage of limitations—if he can find them."

—Peter Elbow, Writing with Power