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Summation
“What began as a healthy reaction, a turning away with relief from sterile academic rhetorics, had proliferated in an unexampled production of notations: poems which tell of things seen or done, but...
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Bottomland
“When the poet stands at nadir the world must indeed be upside down. If the poet can no longer speak for society, but only for himself, then we are at the last ditch.”...
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Safety First
Two for Philip Levine: “A writer is a reader who is moved to emulation.” (Saul Bellow) “There’s never any final certainty about what you do. Your opinion of your own work fluctuates wildly. Under the...
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Testament
“Without resistance you can do nothing.” –Jean Cocteau * * * “You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack...
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Equals
On the insulting notion that everyone’s a poet: Sir, These are delicate matters; we all desire To be told that we’ve the true poetic fire. But once, to one whose name I shall not mention, I said,...
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Consumed
Aspiring writer? I have my suspicions, especially when those words come from an adult. Enough. Writing is the most difficult work I know. Ben Jonson: “For a man to write well, there are required three...
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Article 3
“Less than fifteen per cent of the people do any original thinking on any subject. The greatest torture in the world for most people is to think.”...
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More, More, More
“In reality the duty of a writer – the revolutionary duty, if you like – is that of writing well.” –Gabriel García Márquez * *...
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Precedent
“The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.” –Cyril Connolly Tagged: Art, Critical Thinking, Drama, Essay,...
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What Was Lost
I open by alluding to the work of Herbert Morris, unfairly overlooked amid triumphant commercialism, disposable art…shameless, unabashed self-promotion. Taxing intelligence, quietly insisting: reader...
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“Nothing for me.”
Thank you for sending us “—————————.” As writers, we understand how much work goes into creating and submitting your pieces. Unfortunately, this work does not fit in with the current issue on which we...
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Residual
It’s hard, when daily you’re forced to witness the works you treasure, to which you’ve devoted patience and breath, abused and devalued most by those who should be staunch advocates and defenders. I...
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Alignment
“I said that a writer was a man who had antennae; if he really knew what he was, he would be very humble. He would recognize himself as a man who was possessed of a certain faculty which he was...
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Go Set a Poet
“The first discipline is the realization that there is a discipline—that all art begins and ends with discipline, that any art is first and foremost a craft. We have gone far enough on the road to...
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Liberty/License
“…Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way...
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“It did nothing for me.”
“I do not accept this excited rhetoric about what texts ‘actually do,’ which is replacing the older, soberer emphasis on what they say. I regard the methodology of ‘stop and go’ as a parody of genuine...
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Submittable
“Literacy does not involve knowing the meanings of words, or learning grammar, or reading books.” –Wendell Berry, Preface: The Joy of Sales Resistance Tagged:...
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“The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn…”...
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