About Writing

“Something is always born of excess,” Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary in June of 1945.  “Great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”

“A word after a word after a word is power.”
—Margaret Atwood

"Writing is really a way of thinking — not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet."
—Toni Morrisson

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
—Anaïs Nin

"Poetry isn’t a profession; it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that."
—Mary Oliver

The Real Work

The Real Work 

by Wendell Berry

It may be that when we no longer know what to do,

we have come to our real work

and when we no longer know which way to go,

we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

"The Real Work" by Wendell Berry, from Standing by Words. © 1983. Counterpoint.  

"The Tracing....and every misstep along the way." 

Poetry and the Imagination

Poetry and imagination are joined at the imaging.  --Sheila Packa

I imagine that yes is the only living thing.  --e. e. cummings

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.  --John Keats

What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth."  --John Keats

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are, the more necessary it is to be plain. --Samuel Taylor Coleridge

People can die of mere imagination.  --Geoffrey Chaucer

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.  --Percy Bysshe Shelley

We say God and the imagination are one… How high that highest candle lights the dark.
 --Wallace Stevens

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.  --Wislawa Szymborska

Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
  --Denis Diderot

For women . . . poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we can predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
  Audre Lorde

Do you know how poetry started? I always think that it started when a cave boy came running back to the cave, through the tall grass, shouting as he ran, “Wolf, wolf,” and there was no wolf. His baboon-like parents, great sticklers for the truth, gave him a hiding, no doubt, but poetry had been born—the tall story had been born in the tall grass.
  Vladimir Nabokov

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.
  Carl Sandburg
 
And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. --Sylvia Plath.

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Quotes from the Masters

"Poetry is made up of nothing except beautiful details."   --Voltaire


I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; prose—words in their best order; poetry—the best words in their best order.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk (July 12, 1827)


This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body…
-- Walt Whitman,  from Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855)


If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it.  Is there any other way.  --Emily Dickinson

In poetry, the exchange is one of energy. Human energy is transferred, and from the poem it reaches the reader. Human energy, which is consciousness, the capacity to produce change in existing conditions. The only danger is in not going far enough. The usable truth here deals with change. But we are speaking of the human spirit. If we go deep enough, we reach the common life, the shared experience of man, the world of possibility.  If we do not go deep, if we live and write half-way, there are the obscurity, vulgarity, the slang of fashion, and several kinds of death.
--Muriel Rukeyser in The Life of Poetry


Walking, like prose, has a definite aim....When the man who is walking has reached his goal...when he was reached the place, book, fruit, the object of his desire...this possession at once entirely annuls his whole act; the effect swallows up the cause, the end absorbs the means; and whatever the act, only the result remains. It is the same with utilitarian language: the language I use to express my design, my desire, my command, my opinion; this language, when it has served its purpose, evaporates almost as it is heard....The poem, on the other hand, does not die for having lived: it is expressly designed to be born again from its ashes and to become endlessly what it has just been. Poetry can be recognized by this property, that it tends to get itself reproduced in its own form: it stimulates us to reconstruct it identically. 
-- Paul Valery, "Poetry and Abstract Thought," The Art of Poetry

The difference between the action of a poem and and of an ordinary narrative is physiological.
--Paul Valery, "Remarks on Poetry," The Art of Poetry

What Do Poems Do?

It's hard to describe exactly what a great poem does. Here are some thoughts: 
  
"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."
--Emily Dickinson

"Energy within the poet goes into the poem, but then must go from the poem to a reader or listener. There has to be this transfer of energy."
—Muriel Rukeyser

"Imaginative work is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground; it is like a spider web attached ever so lightly, but attached to all four corners of the earth."
—Virginia Woolf

"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting."
—Robert Frost

"Truth is not an unveiling which destroys the secret, but a revelation that does it justice."
—Walter Benjamin