Monday Morning Quote: Sharon Olds on Working

Writing or making anything—a poem, a bird feeder, a chocolate cake—has self-respect in it. You're working. You're trying. You're not lying down on the ground, having given up.

—Sharon Olds, in an interview on Oprah.com

Monday Morning Quote: C. K. Williams on Taste

How shifty a thing taste can be, how shitty, even one's own. I tremble to remember the poets, like Elizabeth Bishop, I dismissed out of hand, whose greatness dawned on me only later. Then there are poets I once admired and who opened the way through thickets for me, but whose work now I find clumsy and shiftless. I think we all tend to believe we can see through the vagaries of our moment to some absolute standard of judgment—this must be a characteristic of human consciousness itself—but the conviction is absurd. So, I never blab anymore about poets whose work doesn't or no longer moves me. But there are, however, thank goodness, poets the power and force of whose work once nearly knocked me down with delight and envy, and still does, so that when I read them again I feel again like an apprentice.

—C. K. Williams, in his essay "On Being Old,"
given as the Poetry Society Annual Lecture (2011)
commissioned by the Poetry Society of London
and reprinted in the The American Poetry Review

Here's the whole lecture:

CK Williams Poetry Society Annual Lecture, 25th May 2011 from ncla on Vimeo.

Monday Morning Quote: George Bilgere on Inspiration

I think "inspiration" is what happens, if you’re lucky, during the rather dull and arduous process of writing a poem. You’re plugging away, nothing of much interest is going on, you’re thinking this one’s going to be a dud—then, bingo! Something nice and surprising happens, the poem suddenly comes alive, sits up on the table, and demands something to eat. It doesn’t happen often, but it’s great when it does.

—George Bilgere, author of The White Museum,
in an interview on the "How a Poem Happens" blog

Monday Morning Quote: Gail Mazur on Image

If you think of an image as a jumping-off point, you can do so much. The poem isn’t hermetic, it’s reaching out. The first poem in Figures in a Landscape, about the hermit crab, isn’t really about a hermit crab. It has marine information, tarot, and Aristotle, but it’s really about loneliness. Hermit crabs are a little horrifying, really. Often they’re not alone in the shells they borrow, they don’t have their own, and sometimes when they outgrow their shell they bring its previous owner with them. That’s pretty complicated, isn’t it? You don’t have to write the connection between them and us. It’s all there.

—Gail Mazur in a wonderful interview
on the Porter Square Books blog.

Monday Morning Quote: Maxine Kumin on Dreams

Virtually every dream example I call up out of my poems teeters on the border between life and death, this seems quite apt to me, for I feel that poetry is essentially elegiac in its nature. We hold hard to those we love even as they die away from us and we continue to pursue them, through dreams into poems.

—Maxine Kiumin, Always Beginning

Monday Morning Quote: Jeanette Winterson on The Consoling Power of Poetry

So when people say that poetry is merely a luxury for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read much at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is.

—Jeanette Winterson, in "Shafts of Sunlight, in The Guardian

Monday Morning Quote: Richard Hoffman on a Life in Poetry

...I have a life that is largely made of poetry, of the poetry of others, both the dead and the living, and the poetry I try to write. I would not exchange that life, that ongoing education, that continual growth, for anything. Poetry returns to me the things I know and have forgotten, and among those things there dwells the deepest and oldest and least distorted version of myself: that consciousness that first looked for the right words, the right nouns, verbs, adjectives — the right sounds — to make sense of the world.

—Richard Hoffman, in a talk at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival

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

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.

Monday Morning Quote: Marvin Bell

Much of our lives involves the word “no.” In school, we are mostly told, Don’t do this, do that. Don’t do it this way, do it that way. But art is the big yes. In art, you get a chance to make something where there was nothing.

—Marvin Bell, Commencement Address, Whidbey Writers Workshop, Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, MFA Graduation

Monday Morning Quote: Sharon Olds

Poems like mine—I don't call them confessional, with that tone of admitting to wrong-doing. My poems have done more accusing than admitting. I call work like mine "apparently personal". Or in my case apparently very personal.

—Sharon Olds, interviewed in The Guardian in 2008

Some of my favorite Sharon Olds poems:
First Thanksgiving
I Go Back to May 1937
The Promise

Monday Morning Quote: Steve Martin on Inspiration

Through the years, I have learned there is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration.

—Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

I read this book after seeing a video of a conversation between Connie Willis and Neil Gaiman at the 2011 World Fantasy Convention in San Diego, CA (below). At the end of the conversation Ms. Willis, a favorite author of mine, suggested that they each recommend one book for the attendees to read, and this was her choice.

Monday Morning Quote: Kurt Vonnegut and Saul Steinberg on Two Kinds of Artists

Who was the wisest person I ever met in my life? It was a man, but of course it needn't have been. It was the graphic artist Saul Steinberg, who like everybody else I know, is dead now. I could ask him anything, and six seconds would pass, and then he would give me a perfect answer, gruffly, almost a growl....

I said, "I am a novelist, and many of my friends are novelists and good ones, but when we talk I keep feeling like we are in two different businesses. What makes me feel that way?"

Six seconds passed, and then he said "It's very simple. There are two sort of artists, one not being in the least superior to the other. But one response to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself."

I said, "Saul, are you gifted?"

Six seconds passed, and then he growled, "No, but what you respond to in any work of art is the artist's struggle against his or her limitations."

—Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country

Monday Morning Quote: Kim Addonizio on Art as a Response to Hopelessness

Art is a way of dealing with hopelessness, with anger and despair and loss. It is a creative response. While there is a real distinction between art and therapy, the truth is that art is theraputic, It helps you to take something that is within you and make a place for it outside of yourself.

—Kim Addonizio, in Ordinary Genius

Monday Morning Quote: Ellen Hinsey on the Power of Poetry

Contrary to a generally held view, poetry is a very powerful tool, because poetry is the conscience of a society.... No individual poem can stop a war–that's what diplomacy is supposed to do. But poetry is an independent ambassador for conscience: it answers to no one, its crosses borders without a passport, and it speaks the truth. That's why, despite talk about its marginalization, it is one of the most powerful of the arts.

—Ellen Hinsey, in an interview with Poetry Magazine

I owe this week's quote to Garrison Keillor's wonderful The Writer's Almanac. I find it invariably interesting and inspiring, and I highly recommend that you subscribe to and support it.

Monday Morning Quote: New Poet Laureate Philip Levine on Surprise

[Y]ou have to follow where the poem leads. And it will surprise you. It will say things you didn't expect to say. And you look at the poem and you realize, "That is truly what I felt." That is truly what I saw.

—Philip Levine, in an interview with NPR

Monday Morning Quote: Louise Glück on Poetry

Poetry is autobiography stripped of context and commentary.

—Louise Glück, Proofs and Theories

Paul Lisicky on About-ness

Sadye Teiser: In workshop, you were talking about the complexity of figuring out what a piece of fiction is "about," what aspects you want to focus on as you tell each story. Could you talk a little bit about this process? Have you ever, in your own writing, figured out what you want your book to focus on while writing and then had to backtrack?

Paul Lisicky: About-ness is such a tricky thing. I don't think we ever want our work to be wholly explainable, or to support a thesis. We want it to be mysterious. We want it to move like music. But we also want it to be bound by meaning. A lot of that meaning is already embedded in our metaphors, whether we know it or not. The trick is to write toward a space that knows more than we do. And that often involves throwing out the original plan.

—Paul Lisicky, author of The Burning House, in an interview with Sadye Teiser for the UNCW Creative Writing Department newsletter, excepted on his blog.