Thoughts on writing from authors born December 27:
from British poet Mina Loy (Lunar Baedeker, Insel,
Stories and Essays) (1882-1966):
Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual
thoughts, the sound of an idea.
--
from German novelist and screenwriter Thea von Harbou
(Das indische Grabmal, Dr. Mabuse films, Die Nibelungen
films, Metropolis, M) (1888-1954):
This book is not of today or of the future.
It tells of no place.
It serves no cause, party or class.
It has a moral which grows on the pillar of
understanding:
The mediator between brain and muscle must be the
Heart.
--
from American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and
essayist Louis Bromfield (Early Autumn) (1896-1956):
There is a rhythm in life, a certain beauty which
operates by a variation of lights and shadows, happiness alternating with
sorrow, content with discontent, distilling in this process of contrast a sense
of satisfaction, of richness that can be captured and pinned down only by those
who possess the gift of awareness.
--
from American poet Charles Olson (Projective Verse,
The Distances, The Maximus Poems) (1910-1970):
of rhythm is image / of image is knowing / of knowing
there is / a construct
The poem, for me, is simply the first sound realized
in the modality of being.
A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got
it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all
the way over to, the reader.
You can read everybody. It's not even interesting to
tell the truth because to some extent it's false.
I defer to all these other American poets who, for
some reason, I both envy and admire.
--
from British-born American novelist and essayist
Wilfrid Sheed (A Middle Class Education, Frank and Maisie, Office Politics,
The House that George Built) (1930-2011):
I picked up the writing on the very day he died. It
was the only consolation I could find.
One reason the human race has such a low opinion of
itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers.
It's the old case against symbols: if you get them,
they seem obvious and artificial, and if you don't, you miss the whole point.
Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
You noodle around with tempo and sound until you get
the perfect fit for that particular song, and then, so long as you can sustain
it, God is on your side and everything comes easily and even the waiters smile.
The only reason I didn't kill myself after I read the
reviews of my first book was because we have two rivers in New York and I
couldn't decide which one to jump into.
I rail against writers who talk about the loneliness
of it all—what do they want, a crowd looking over their typewriters? Or those
who talk about having to stare at a blank page—do they want someone to write on
it?
Books about suicide make lousy gifts.
--
from Australian novelist Alex Miller (The Ancestor
Game, Journey to the Stone Country, Lovesong, Autumn Laing) (born 1936):
Story is the greatest human mystery.
from New Zealand’s inaugural Poet Laureate Bill
Manhire (How to Take Off Your Clothes at the Picnic, Zoetropes, Milky Way
Bar, Lifted, Wow) (born 1946):
I suppose what I really like is to set up a system
which looks wonderfully secure when you first encounter it on the page, but
within the framework there are crazy things which tip the reader off-balance.
--
from Nigerian-American novelist, poet, and essayist
Chris Abani (Graceland, Becoming Abigail, The Virgin of Flames, The Secret
History of Las Vegas) (born 1966):
... it's the agents of our imagination who really
shape who we are.
Story is powerful. Story is fluid and it belongs to
nobody.
Every successful artist comes from a family—parents or
siblings or both—who, although equally gifted, chose not to pursue the
treacherous and difficult path of the artist.
The question is, how do I balance narratives that are
wonderful with narratives of wounds and self-loathing? And this is the difficulty
that I face. I am trying to move beyond political rhetoric to a place of
ethical questioning. I am asking us to balance the idea of our complete
vulnerability with the complete notion of transformation or what is possible.
The privilege of being a writer is that you have this
opportunity to slow down and to consider things.
The art is never about what you write about. The art
is about how you write about what you write about.
In this time of the Internet and nonfiction, to be on
an actual bookshelf in an actual bookstore is exciting in itself.
--
from American history and culture author Sarah Vowell (Assassination
Vacation, The Wordy Shipmates, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States)
(born 1969):
History is full of really good stories. That's the
main reason I got into this racket: I want to make the argument that history is
interesting.
I have a similar affection for the parenthesis (but I
always take most of my parentheses out, so as not to call undue attention to
the glaring fact that I cannot think in complete sentences, that I think only
in short fragments or long, run-on thought relays that the literati call stream
of consciousness but I still like to think of as disdain for the finality of
the period).
I'm a big fan of editing and keeping only the
interesting bits in.
No one I know actually reads what I write, so thank heavens for you strangers.