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

The Final Top 10 for 2010

Fire to Fire, by Mark Doty

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender

The Ticking Is the Bomb, by Nick Flynn

The Art of Description by Mark Doty

Name All the Animals, by Alison Smith

A Poetry Handbook, by Mary Oliver

The Wild Iris, by Louise Glück

Native Guard, by Natasha Trethewey

All-American Poem, by Matthew Dickman

Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, by Steve Almond

This has sat in my "drafts" folder for almost a year, waiting for me to come up with something else to say for it, and I'm giving up and moving on to 2011. 2010 was the year I started reading a lot of poetry, and I think for 2011 I will have separate lists for poetry and prose -- see the sidebar.

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.

Hazards of Poetry, Automotive Edition

This morning I was working on revising some poems. Line breaks are my nemesis, and I left one poem in a state that I was less than happy about. As I was driving to work I was thinking about that poem and suddenly had an idea about how to restructure my problem stanza. I'm not sure what I was looking at (OK, I think I may have been looking at the line breaks in my head), but the car ahead of me braked suddenly and I just missed a collision. But(!) I did not forget my new line breaks, and I'm going home now to make the change...

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