Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts

Saturday, April 28, 2012

From The Gift:

The poet Gary Snyder, asked in an interview why the oral tradition is so weak in the United States, answered: "Because of the stress on individual names and the emphasis on keeping a text pure."

Each of these preoccupations -- the one a concern of the market, the other a concern of the academy -- treats our art as proprietary works, not gifts.

Spot on. Page 247, in a footnote, in the edition I bought a couple of weeks go.

http://www.lewishyde.com/publications/the-gift








Thursday, September 8, 2011

I Hear an Argument Coming On

From Janet Burroway's Imaginative Writing: Elements of Craft:

Especially and to a heightened degree in poetry, this density, this more-than-one-thing-at-a-time, raises the intensity of feeling.  Poet Donald Hall observes that, "In logic no two things can occupy the same point at the same time, and in poetry that happens all the time.  This is almost what poetry is for, to be able to embody contrary feelings in the same motion."

I don't use this textbook, but this passage is great for disagreeing with, especially if you've got examples in front of you and poets sitting around in plastic rolling chairs at 4pm on a Monday afternoon ready to be talking about such things amidst the percolating from their stomachs.