i heart charles simic
October 7, 2007
I don’t have a recipe, he says. Each poem is a struggle with endless revisions and tinkerings. I don’t know where the next poem is going to come from — a bit of language, an image, a mood, a recalled experience. Something sets off a train of associations and the poem begins.
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If you don’t credit Dana (by using her full name and preferably by linking back to the appropriate post) for however you copy, distribute, transmit or adapt her words, you are being bad. And naughty. And she will have her servant monkeys hunt you down and cut your hands off so you can never copy, distribute, transmit or adapt anyone’s work again and call it your own.
(Unless, of course, you were to use your butt cheeks to manipulate your keyboard with the copying, distributing, transmitting, adapting and whatnot, but Dana fortunately has only met one person whose butt cheeks are that talented. He could play a major third on a piano using nothing but his ass. She kids you not.).
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Simic is amazing! I’ve heard him interviewed a number of times recently and I am of the opinion that one thing that makes him so very effective with language is he is one of those poets that is always open to inner discovery even if it seems to go against the grain of one’s logical side.
I’m reading some essays by Donald Hall presently and he is another who fits this mold, if you can call it that.
Michael, I just read a brief bio on Hall, which talks about how his decision to stop teaching and to pay attention to his poetry had an enormous effect on his writing.
“Hall made a habit of rising early, devoting his first and best hours to poems, then turning to prose, much of it done for hire.”
I need this kind of discipline. I know I write poetry best early in the morning and right before I go to bed. I need to stop messing around with other forms of writing and various distractions (namely my husband, and not all of the distractions from him are ones I invite) during these periods of the day and use my time more wisely.
I wish I had the disciple for writing that I had for playing music. My playing, as a result of that discipline, was better ~ much better ~ than my poetry-writing is.
I’m going to get all that straightened out, though. I’m thinking of applying the same approach to my writing that I applied to my flute playing. I really don’t have anything that would stand in my way, other than myself.