Reading is complicity in the creative process. Marina Tsvetaeva
Tag Archives: Lit
Writing is embodiment. Reading is contact. Edward Hirsch How to Read A Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999) (facebook I twitter I instagram)
No, I don’t feel death coming. I feel death going: having thrown up his hands, for the moment. James Baldwin. “Amen.” Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems. Beacon Press. (2014)(facebook I twitter I instagram)
Rhythm is a form cut into time, as Ezra Pound said […] Rhythm is all about recurrence and change. It is poetry’s way of charging the depths, hitting the fathomless. It is oceanic. Edward Hirsch How to Read A Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999)
The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets. William Carlos Williams(Hirsch 1999, p.13)
How Emily Dickinson Recognized True Poetry
Emily Dickinson’s test of poetry:If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever 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. Is there …
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Zadie Smith’s Swing Time
I liked, but did not love this book.The book begins with failure. Or “my humiliation” as the narrator, a young woman, puts it. The young woman has been sent back to London by some unknown employer. She is hiding in considerable affluence and is tasked with avoiding the public, not to escalate a situation. From …
Immortal Dates in Fiction
Today, April 4th, is the day the action of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 begins. Lit Hub points this out and offers a list of 49 other important dates in fiction.
My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all …
Literary history and the present are dark with silences, some the silences for years by our acknowledged great; some silences hidden; some the ceasing to publish after one work appears; some the never coming to book form at all. Tillie Olsen, quoted by Rebecca Solnit
CLARITY AND CHAOS 