Poet and Playwright
Kensington, CA
Joyridin
We work in the dark -- we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. -- Henry James, American novelist & critic (1843-1916)
Quotes from
THE WRITING HABIT: ESSAYS by David Huddle.
Quotes from Gail Sher
One simply cannot be in a foul state of mind for part of the day and expect to arrive at her writing period in a pristine one
. . . You must develop the you that ‘just knows’ (your intuition) and stand unwaveringly by this knowledge. When someone asks for proof, just smile and say ‘because.’
... ‘Ping’ means ‘It’s right and I know it.’ . . . When you hack away at your writing and it refuses to ping, it means you still have something to learn -- either about your subject, your feelings about your subject, or, more likely, both.
-- from Gail Sher's ONE CONTINUOUS MISTAKE: FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS FOR WRITERS
Quotes From AN IRA SADOFF READER: SELECTED POETRY AND PROSE, by Ira Sadoff
From the chapter entitled "Hearing Voices: The Fiction of Poetic Voice":
. . . writers always shape a 'presentation self' or 'personality'; every linguistic choice self-consciously excludes, hides as well as it reveals; the poem's speaker is not exactly the writer; a poet's language only recreates or metaphorically approximates fragments of a writer's feelings. . . .
. . . So when we refer to a writer as 'confessional,' for example, we really mean a writer's language creates the fiction of intimacy. . .
. . . Because poems are dramatic experiences, feelings change as we put one word in front of the other: we never end up in the same place we begin. The language transforms reader and writer. The conscious or unconscious urge to please, in poetry as in life, dulls and limits. . .
. . . When we speak habitually, habit being the enemy of the intensification of experience, our poems become inattentive and dull. . . .
. . . if a poet's later poems do not excite me the way his or her best earlier poems did, I think it's not only because I read the earlier oems first, but because ritual and habit -- attaching oneself to the patterns of a voice -- can intrude on the discoveries of their poems and can dull their voices.
Quotes from James Appelwhite
from "Poetry & Memory" in The Writer, October 1994, pages 24-27.
We remember by association, or linkage, and so reading with comprehension requires, in a sense, reading with recognition . . . new knowledge acquired by the eyes and nerves from words must be connected into the networking of memory, things newly observed attaching themselves to things previously learned . . .
. . . I don't think it profitable for a writer to try to use memory, directly. Memory is always allowing itself to be used, but won't be coerced; there are better strategies than head-on pressure. Memory has its own processes and its own selectivity. Scenes, faces, bits of story that rise up spontaneously are thus more likely to have an emotive significance than those memories we might deliberately call up.
. . . Really to remember is often to reencounter a part of experience, perhaps distant from present life but still related to it. Profound memory can continue the assimilation of a part of our lives we'd thought we'd finished with, but hadn't . . .
. . . the driving force behind memory is not memory is not merely the desire to call up earlier days, but the deeply felt need to reencounter unresolved issues and emotions -- the need to understand, to come to terms with, past time.
. . . Poetry is an old story that comes alive with the new idea. The names and the events and the rhymes are similar but never quite the same . . . The way to use time and memory as a writer is to let it use you.
. . . Ours are the only voices through which the past can speak, in becoming the present and the future. Ours is the equasl of any time, because it has all times within it. But the empowerment of the past lies buried, unless we can find ways to experience it as alive. The poet occasionally needs to surrender some of his or her conscious intention, even some of the present sense of self, in order to be visited by the times and presences held in the deeper layers of memory.
Copyright 2015 Deborah Dashow Ruth. All rights reserved.
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Kensington, CA
Joyridin