A Writer's Notebook, Day Five-Hundred-And-Eighteen

The poetry festival is really going incredibly.  Last year was really what got me back into gear with my poetry writing.  Though I had been trying to get work going, it took the push I had at that time to get me to commit once more to making poetry a daily practice for me.  This year, I arrived in a very different place.  I am writing incredible amounts of poetry, so what really I wanted was more of an opportunity to get deeper into the craft, to work on pushing myself further.  Spending even such a brief time in a community that is committed to poetry is also, in and of itself, an important thing, especially in terms of the kind of support I tend to find from other poets.  As well, the workshop I am in is itself incredible, and I am finding that Major Jackson's approach is helping me to find the work that I've often been afraid or hesitant to write, which may be the most important thing for any poet.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Writer's Notebook, Day Three-Hundred-And-Sixty-Five

One of my teachers, the late poet Thomas Lux, was fond of pointing out that writing and publishing are two different things.  He stressed the need for a writer to focus on the work itself, not on the building of a career or the accumulation of publishing credits and other accolades.  Those things are not what a writer should be working towards, he would say, but instead the focus needs to be upon the craft.  He once expressed to me his belief that great work will always find a way into the world, even if it is after the artist has died.  Emily Dickinson is, of course, a prime example of this, though far from the only one.  That is a fine way to think about these things, but, and Lux also acknowledged this, to have a career as a writer requires doing all that other work. I tend to think that the writing itself is an important act on its own, having nothing to do with whether the work finds an audience immediately or not, and the publishing aspect as more of an ...
Read more

A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-And-Forty-Five

I have been thinking about narrative point of view quite a bit lately.  One thing that always fascinates me is considering how the early novels were all written such that the narrative was diegetic to the text.  That is to say, the text that conveyed the story was something which was said to exist within the world of the story itself in some form.  In  Pamela, for example, Richardson employs the use of an epistolary form, allowing the reader to see the existence of the text itself as an artifact of the tale.  Now, this is very different than many modern stories in which we accept reading words that reflect the mind of a character as it exists in the moment.  Faulkner's stream of consciousness is a clear example of this distinction, but even many works of genre fiction rely on our accepting reading a narrative that by its nature cannot and does not exist within the text.  I think there is a great deal more to consider in this, but I am just beginning my...
Read more

A Writer's Notebook, Day Two-Hundred-And-Fifty

Each of the three pieces I wrote today was a bit of a struggle to get going, if I am honest.  That happens, as I have mentioned, and my answer is generally to just wait it out, and the results vary.  A lot of the time, if I am really stuck, I might try to force something out, often it winds up being a bit meta, with me writing about being stuck without much in terms of inspiration, and it feels a bit like I am working scales in a way.  All the aesthetic decisions are there, they just don't always have a lot of purpose behind them, and that is fine in that context.  Essentially, I am just forcing myself to do the work, and getting it done, and I am showing myself that I can and will do it even if inspiration never strikes.  This can often take pressure off, and that lack of pressure opens up creative thinking and inspiration. Now, that is a fine thing for me to do, and I am likely to use that approach again many times in the future, but today I felt that I want...
Read more