Wise Words

Thoughts on writing from creative people born January 10:

from English Modernist sculptor Dame Barbara Hepworth CBE, DBE (Mother and Child, Pelagos, Corinthos, Figure for a Landscape, Curved Forms, Squares with two circles) (1903-1975):

I rarely draw what I see. I draw what I feel in my body.

I found one had to do some work every day, even at midnight, because either you're professional or you're not.

Body experience... is the centre of creation.

Halfway through any work, one is often tempted to go off on a tangent. Once you have yielded, you will be tempted to yield again and again... Finally, you would only produce something hybrid.

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from American poet Robinson Jeffers (Tamar and Otber Poems, Cawdor, Thurso's Landing, Be Angry at the Sun) (1887-1962):

Imagination, the traitor of the mind, has taken my solitude and slain it.

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from American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet laureate Philip Levine (The Simple Truth); also known for The Names of the Lost, Ashes: Poems New and Old, 7 Years from Somewhere, What Work Is) (1928-2015):

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme... they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.

I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own.

Oh, yes, let’s bless the imagination. It gives us the myths we live by. Let’s bless the visionary power of the human—the only animal that’s got it—, bless the exact image of your father dead and mine dead, bless the images that stalk the corners of our sight and will not let go.

Don't scorn your life just because it's not dramatic, or it's impoverished, or it looks dull, or it's workaday. Don't scorn it. It is where poetry is taking place if you've got the sensitivity to see it, if your eyes are open.

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

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from American poet Dorianne Laux (What We Carry, Facts About the Moon, The Book of Men, Only As the Day is Long) (born 1952):

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world.

We're all writing out of a wound, and that's where our song comes from. The wound is singing. We're singing back to those who've been wounded.

I write to invite the voices in, to watch the angel wrestle, to feel the devil gather on its haunches and rise. I write to hear myself breathing. I write to be doing something while I wait to be called to my appointment with death. I write to be done writing. I write because writing is fun.

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.

Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us.