Category: Good Writing
-
WCW on Howl
“We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.” – William Carlos Williams in a introduction to ‘Howl,’ by Allen Ginsberg
-
The happy artist?
It’s my first day back at work today. And usually the first day is OK. I’ve carried over a calm that I always hope will last, but as the weeks go on something usually starts building and a big fat invisible elephant likes to sit on my chest and get in the way. I had…
-
Excerpt from Inferno – Eileen Myles
“Over the years I discovered it was always good to go. I have a hard time knowing what to do. About leaving. I’d feel I was ready and yet I was too embarrassed to draw attention to myself by saying goodbye so I’d wait, or leave with Tom, or someone. Sometimes I’d just escape, not…
-
Traveling Mercies Excerpt, Anne Lamott
“Twice I have held the ashes of people I adored – my dad’s, my friend Pammy’s. Nearly twenty years ago I poured my father’s into the water near Angel Island, late at night, but I was twenty-five years old and very drunk at the time and so my grief was anesthetized. When I opened the…
-
Joni, the great
“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…
-
It's not importanat
“Once (Roethke) said to me, that nervous undergrad who wanted the love of the world to roar out every time he put a word down, ‘Don’t worry about publishing. That’s not important.’ He might have added, only the act of writing is. It’s flattering to be told you are better than someone else, but victories…
-
The Triggering Town
“You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything.” -Richard Hugo from “The Triggering Town”
-
Zoe Keating
I read in an interview with Zoe Keating that as a girl – because she would get so nervous about her upcoming cello lessons – the only way she could calm herself down was to play open strings. It reminds me a lot of how poetry is for me or my journal is for me.…