Wise Words

 

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.