Reflections of a working writer and reader
Michelangelo said he could sense the figure in the uncut stone; his job was to chip away marble till it emerged. Inuit sculptors say the same thing. And that makes sense to me. Cadence is the medium, the raw stone; the poem is already sustained in it. And writing means cutting away everything that isn't the poem. You can't "write" a poem, in fact - you can only help it stand free in the torrent. Most of my time with a pen is spent giving words, images, bright ideas that are borne along in cadence their permission to stay off the page. The poem is what remains; it is local cadence minus whatever is extraneous to its shapely articulation. A bad poem, on the other hand, is something a poet made up. Dennis Lee
Listening to stories widens the imagination; telling them lets us leap over cultural walls, embrace different experiences, feel what others feel. Elif Shafak builds on this simple idea to argue that fiction can overcome identity politics.
“Knowledge that takes you not beyond yourself is far worse than ignorance.”
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That quote could have been phrased a bit clearer. I think self-knowledge is a thing to be sought after personally. Too many of us only think we know ourselves. As the years go by and we get tested, only then do we start to see that our earlier estimations were far out.
True, Jim. On both counts. But the mountain remains, whatever part of it we manage or fail to scale.