January 2010
14 posts
2 tags
“A poetry journal is basically a writing journal, but it’s also poetry...”
– Ha Jin, Paris Review 191, page 143 (revised slightly to work as a quote)
3 tags
“Revision for me is where the book is made, because the process of revision is...”
– Ha Jin, interviewed by Sarah Fay, Paris Review 191, page 139
2 tags
Comets
No doubt comets feel themselves immortal,
Desire like cigarettes lit end to tip,
Perpetual motion, each act a portal
To its variant, giving life the slip,
Life with its inevitable questions:
Marriage and babies, making a household,
Moving from one scene, all its congestions,
To another—and letting things unfold.
Comets don’t face these pressures, which is why
Their tails are twice as...
2 tags
Four kinds of fire
I received an invitation (to a lot of people, not to me specifically) to write something for a forthcoming issue of Arcade on fire. This has triggered thoughts of writing four short essays on different interpretations of the word. Perhaps also a poem, if it fits. Have to see.
2 tags
“A writer must live or die by his writing. Good for that and nothing else. A war,...”
– Emerson, quoted in Richardson, First We Read, Then We Write, Iowa, 2009, page 48.
3 tags
“The only path of escape known in all the worlds of God is performance. You must...”
– Emerson, quoted in Robert D. Richardson, First We Read, Then We Write, University of Iowa Press, 2009, page 24
“The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.”
– William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, quoted in Jonathan Raban, “Summer with Empson,” London Review of Books, 5 November 2009, pages 37-41
3 tags
“Is hypochondria a creative mechanism employed by the perfectionist? Each crisis...”
– Hilary Mantel, “What is going on in there?” a review of Brian Dillon’s Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives, Penguin, 2009, in London Review of Books, 5 November 2009, page 30
2 tags
“A dialectical thought to me is one that gives the devil his due but at the same...”
– Terry Eagleton, “Oxford/Dublin,” in Eagleton and Beaumont, The Task of the Critic, Verso, 2009, page 236.
3 tags
“Marxism understands itself, on the one hand, as the child of the Enlightenment....”
– Terry Eagleton, “Oxford/Dublin,” in Eagleton and Beaumont, The Task of the Critic, Verso, 2009, page 235.
1 tag
“My conception of utopia assumes that you have to have some kind of immanence, an...”
– Eagleton, “Oxford/Dublin,” in The Task of the Critic, Verso, 2009, page 228.
2 tags
“I am sometimes horrified by the implicit acquiescence in academicism maintained...”
– Eagleton, “Theory/Practice,” in Eagleton and Beaumont, The Task of the Critic, Verso, 2009, pages 193-194. (The quote is condensed)
1 tag
“I think we need to shift from the idea of literature to the idea of writing....”
– Terry Eagleton, “Theory/Practice,” in Eagleton and Beaumont, The Task of the Critic, Verso, 2009, page 193
2 tags
“One can fall into the trap of seeing socialist or radical tradition simply as a...”
– Terry Eagleton in, “Marxism/Feminism,” Eagleton and Beaumont, The Task of a Critic, Verso, 2009, pages 178-179.