RachelVB.com

Category: Good Writing

  • "Invocation" by Elaine Equi

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    Come Inspiration, sweet as two beautiful hookers in a dream. Don’t go girls– even if you don’t know a thing about poetry, at least help me decide what to wear.

  • A Victim Treats His Mugger Right

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    “Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner. But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an…

  • Just what I needed

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    This is an amazing interview with Billy Collins from 2006. “there’s this pet phrase about writing that is bandied around particularly in workshops about ‘finding your own voice as a poet’, which I suppose means that you come out from under the direct influence of other poets and have perhaps found a way to combine…

  • From "Skykomish River Running"

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    “The river Sky is running in my hair. I am floating past the troutless pools learning water is the easy way to go. I will reach the sea before December when the Sky is turning gray and wild and rolling heavy from the east to say late autumn was an Oriental child.” -Richard Hugo

  • Creatives

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    “If there is one word that makes creative people different from others, it is the word complexity. Instead of being an individual, they are a multitude. Like the color white that includes all colors, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves. Creativity allows for paradox, light, shadow, inconsistency, even…

  • Larson's Holstein Bull, By Jim Harrison

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    Death waits inside us for a door to open. Death is patient as a dead cat. Death is a doorknob made of flesh. Death is that angelic farm girl gored by the bull on her way home from school, crossing the pasture for a shortcut. In the seventh grade she couldn’t read or write. She…

  • Collaborative writing/reading

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    “If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.” — Ernest Hemingway from “Death in the Afternoon.”

  • Reposting a needed Joni quote

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    “I was demanding of myself a deeper and greater honesty, more and more revelation in my work, in order to give it back to the people; where it goes into their lives and nourishes them and changes their direction and, you know, makes light bulbs go off in their head and makes them feel. And…

  • ooh ooh, me too!

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    “I really would like to stop working forever–never work again, never do anything like the kind of work I’m doing now–and do nothing but write poetry and have leisure to spend the day outdoors and go to museums and see friends. And I’d like to keep living with someone — maybe even a man —…

  • For Strong Women, by Marge Piercy

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    A strong woman is a woman who is straining A strong woman is a woman standing on tiptoe and lifting a barbell while trying to sing “Boris Godunov.” A strong woman is a woman at work cleaning out the cesspool of the ages, and while she shovels, she talks about how she doesn’t mind crying,…