Hello, World

Mind led body
to the edge of the precipice.
They stared in desire
at the naked abyss.
If you love me, said mind,
take that step into silence.
If you love me, said body,
turn and exist.

 via tobia:oxbridge.

“This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.” -

Gary Provost  (via tobia)

Dear students: take note. 

“Beware of writers who tell you how hard they work. (Beware of anybody who tries to tell you that.) Writing is indeed often dark and lonely, but no one really has to do it. Yes, writing can be complicated, exhausting, isolating, abstracting, boring, dulling, briefly exhilarating; it can be made to be grueling and demoralizing. And occasionally it can produce rewards. But it’s never as hard as, say, piloting an L-1011 into O’Hare on a snowy night in January, or doing brain surgery when you have to stand up for 10 hours straight, and once you start you can’t just stop. If you’re a writer, you can stop anywhere, any time, and no one will care or ever know. Plus, the results might be better if you do.” -

Richard Ford

But Richard— what, then, does a writer do when he or she needs to vent?

There’s a method here. Honest. Trust me: I’m a poet. 

(When the going gets tough, the tough take it to the floor…)

““I had gone through and thought about the number of books you could conceivably read in a year, for example. And then if you extrapolate it out over your lifetime, how many can you reasonably read? And it got me thinking about how vast the world of books is, and how small what you will ever take in actually is. And it becomes a sort of overwhelming thought when you realize that no matter how hard you try, no matter how smart you are, no matter how much you love to read – as I put it in the piece, statistically speaking, you’re going to die having missed almost everything.”” -

You Can’t Read Everything - Linda Holmes, via The Rumpus

It’s an epiphany that’s presented itself to me a few times in the past, something I’ve promptly n blanked from my mind as being way too depressing to carry around in the area of my brain that’s dedicated to conscious thought…

(via Cyberspace)

“…this book contains an array of forms; I say that these shifts are integral to the book’s enterprise. One of my challenges, therefore, was to pace the pattern changes in an energetic and intuitively sequenced way—as opposed to a diluted effect. Sort of like a musical improvisation. I didn’t write this book with a sense of its overall architecture: it isn’t a project book. Historically, poets haven’t always composed their books with a “novelistic” eye, and there is no right way to sequence a book of poetry, albeit conventional ways. Many readers don’t even read poetry books in the sequence they’re ordered—a phenomenon that should indicate something about the role of beginnings, middles, and ends in poetry. In any case, I also needed to pace the poems’ content and resisted shaping a narrative arc. However, as these poems do contain narrative details, I had to decide how to let it unfold. For instance, the book’s first poem is an elegy for a lost sibling, an event that is this book’s initiation on the levels of both content and form. It’s the book’s first note and loss sounds again in the book’s final couplet which begins, “this is the robe of loss…”” -

The Rumpus Interview With Shira Dentz - The Rumpus.net

Sunday evening, thinking on the collection…

(via Cyberspace)