A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. You can also browse the blog digest archive at Via Negativa or, if you’d like it in your inbox, subscribe on Substack (where the posts might be truncated by some email providers).
This week: Cassandra at summer camp, being a longlistee, the daily countings, a severed creek, and a gull seeking more. Enjoy!
We’re at the point of the summer where I think, wait, why didn’t I do more? I could have written a novel. I should have written more poems. I could have gotten poetry packets ready to submit when those elusive submission windows open in a month or two. […]
I have been writing a lot of Cassandra poems–what happens when a modern Cassandra sees her prophecies coming true? Last summer, I was working on a poem about Cassandra volunteering at summer camp during a time of climate change; singing about Noah building an “Arky, arky” takes on a different tone.
This week, I finished a poem about Cassandra coloring her hair. Once I might have worried that I was writing too many Cassandra poems–what would it mean for a longer volume of poems? Now I’m happy to be writing at all.
I’m in the mood to write a brand new poem. Let me see if Cassandra speaks to me this week.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Late Summer and Cassandra Poems
Looking around at the media dialogue as well as at my personal connections, I’ve noticed a divide between two very busy camps: there are those of us who are trying to somehow understand and process every new bit of troubling information and then turn it into some kind of emergency action, and those of us who are tuning most of it out as we cling to our version of normalcy, focusing on our personal lives and individual challenges (of which there may be plenty). These two groups don’t include everyone, mind you, and there are lots of variations, but on both sides I see in common an anxious drive toward constant activity, to be perpetually occupied.
In case you’re wondering, I tend to fall closer to the first camp: those who feel an ethical obligation to know and to act, to do something in response to injustice and harm. However, as a poet and writer who also needs lots of time and space to dream and create in order to feel like myself, parts of my doing something may not fall under the heading of traditional activism or social engagement, and include things like writing poetry (and this Substack) connecting with a friend who needs support, or taking my child on foraging walks in the forest behind our house. Other things I do are more recognizable activities, like my work through The School for Living Futures, volunteering, writing and calling politicians, showing up for rallies and marches, and giving financial support. Balance doesn’t come easily, however, and I often have to make a conscious effort to slow down and be present.
Sarah Rose Nordgren, Grounding in Place
We all take the time we take. We each come from a different place and it’s not predictive of where we’re going. There’s choice in where and how we go.
Poetry is part of the journey of working things out. Empathy with the worst versions of self, and love towards those past people is part. I have a strong forward, don’t look back, don’t circle back, urge that is at odds with poetry which by nature is a gathering up. A carrying.
Reading a fan fiction I was knocked left because it Alternate Universed and made a character a divinity school drop out. It cited chapter and verse in a queer-positive context. The story brought partitioned off parts of my brain in dialogue. It was all still in there untouched. Cite chapter and verse and my mouth could move and recite. I had no idea.
It’s what I love poetry to do, to cross-pollinate what isn’t necessarily in dialogue. To make parts of self and world stand on equal footing, all the registers of language, all the past and the hopes, the spirally loops and the straight runs. It’s putting pieces out for someone to find who might resonate with those bits.
Pearl Pirie, Change
Yes, the day has been full of news, but I couldn’t help being super excited—after writing six books of poetry over almost 20 years—one of my poems is finally going to appear on Poetry Daily, this Thursday the 25th! I will of course put up a link here when it is up. I am so thankful for this little break and hope it leads to more people discovering Flare, Corona and reading it!
I also recommend listening to the Slowdown podcast this week and you might hear one of Kelli Russell Agodon’s poems there. […]
A very orange sun at sunset, and a very orange full Buck moon. Can’t tell whether it’s the late July bend of light or air pollution from fires, but it was really beautiful.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Poem from Flare, Corona on Poetry Daily this Thursday, Full Moons and Sunsets, Lavender Festivals and Heat Waves
A girl in a princess dress looks back at her parents as she races for ice cream.
In this forgotten corner of rural Portugal, the three other diners
clutch phones to their ears, shouting Kamala! Then Biden, then back to
Harris… the balding 30-something with his scruffy beard, the chubby bespectacled companion, the woman with flowing dark hair, all consumed by the political stage.Their pork cheeks arrive, they fill glasses with more local wine
Jill Pearlman, Black Pork Cheeks, Fries, Political Football
from their carafe; order another, gesticulate, talk to each other,
talk to their phones, in mixed languages –the word of the day,
Crazy, crazy!
There are so many big, bad and scary things happening in the world at the same time. We all feel it, there is a vibration of unrest and global grief. We are witnessing multiple genocides, daily disasters, murders, drama, crisis, famine… Climate is changed. We are changed. The world has changed. May you live in interesting times is now more like hey, please may we live is slightly less interesting times so we can collectively catch our breath and have a hug? […]
Let’s celebrate the times we openly say to ourselves ‘I don’t agree with myself anymore’ I think it is ok to think ‘I used to think this about things, but then I did some reading and learning and living, and I think I feel different things about things’ Surely the beauty of being alive and getting older is to feel differently about being alive the longer you are alive to have thoughts about being alive. It is liberating that you don’t have to agree with yesterday you, anymore than your tomorrow you, who you have not had the chance to catch up with and meet yet as the world seems to spin faster and faster.
Salena Godden, Do Not Mistake This Smile
My pamphlet “Daughter of a man who loved birds” was longlisted for the Mslexia pamphlet competition. This is a big achievement – Mslexia is a hugely respected magazine, and being one of forty longlistees in the competition shows my work has what it takes. The judges report gave superb insight into what could be improved and developed to transport work all the way to the shortlist and even the winning spot. This paragraph rang particularly loud bells
“The main issue with many manuscripts this year was a sort of cautiousness. Though the writing was consistently fine and showed a range of technical skills, the poems were almost too polite and well-crafted, as though wary of breaking rules and calling attention to themselves. Here the addition of three or four riskier pieces might be all that’s needed to inject a bit more verve and texture into a collection. Do you have a cache of weird and wonderful drafts that might be worth a second look? You may find that adding two or three new poems gives your pamphlet a slightly new slant, which in turn suggests a fresh edit of some of the other poems. Add a new title and you may find you have crafted a pamphlet that is not only significantly different from the original but significantly stronger too.”
Imtiaz Dharker, Judge Mslexia Pamphlet Competition 2024I’ve identified this cautiousness as a strong trait of mine – I am afraid of being “too poetic” and frequently censor my own work as silly, or too high thinking. Confidence is the root of this and oh how I envy those who are self-assured enough to believe that they and their words are of value. […]
I’ve embraced the feedback and really considered the identity of work I’m submitting. I realise I actually have two pamphlets – both with strong themes and identities and both with stories I want to tell. I’ve redrafted, revised and submitted to three competitions run by publishers I respect – now it’s a case of waiting and strengthening resolve for the outcome.
Kathryn Anna Marshall, News from This Wild Feeling
It feels good to be surrounded by the words of wonderful writers when the outdoors is brutally hot and humid, and every joint in my body aches.
Surrounding myself with other people’s books also acted as one more way of avoiding my own creative work. Sometimes, though, waiting around and doing nothing on a project ends up bringing clarification or new ideas. It can prove useful. I have been stalled on my in-progress manuscript, so a month or so back I asked someone to take a look at it–and then I got caught up in doing other things. Like getting cataract surgery and having covid, and then it was gardening in full swing under sweltering weather, and then the bookshelves… I wasn’t exactly procrastinating, but neither was I actively working on, or even thinking about, the collection.
And one night recently–during a much-needed rainstorm–I got a brainstorm! I realized I was trying to pack too many topics into what really should be a manuscript more closely focused on how people who love one another vary in their relationships to old age and death, and on how the contemporary social and medical aspects of the aging process pull us in uncomfortable directions, often distancing us from those relationships. So yes, there should be family poems, hospice poems, biblically-influenced poems, and dealing-with-everyday observation poems. Also some poems of hope and love, poems reminding me (and readers) of the need for compassion in all dealings. But the draft had 92 poems in it, far too many; and some were there just because I like them or they’d been published in a good journal. Which are actually not good enough reasons to include a poem in a collection, according to most of the editors I know.
Ann E. Michael, Useful avoidance
They are so sweet
and dark, down to the stonein the center of their bellies.
Touch them and you comeaway with sweetness
you can name as a color:cherry-sweet, love-sweet,
Luisa A. Igloria, Summer Cherries
tipple on the tip of your tongue.
I write this knowing full well I was once guilty of this in spades, and maybe, even occasionally still. It’s a slippery slope when you are just starting. At first you want that initial publication if you haven’t yet gotten it. Then you want more–bigger name journals and harder mountains to climb. Then you want chapbooks and books and prizes. Teaching gigs and fellowships and residencies. You want to be taken seriously. You want “legitimacy.” These things are all nice to have and fun to pursue, but they should just be frosting on the cake of what you are doing as an artist. Certainly not requisite and not the focus of how you get your work to readers. If you wait for that big goal–that premium journals or big prize, you may be waiting forever to feel like you have arrived. You have arrived the minute you put serious efforts into getting words on the page and finding readers (and for some people, maybe even that second part is superfluous depending on your goals.) As you go, the goal posts get harder and further apart and so many poets I know sort of float in between them. It leads to dissatisfaction and sometimes, stopping the writing altogether.
Kristy Bowen, on becoming a poet
I don’t win poetry competitions. Not least, because I don’t enter them. For lots of reasons – I’m too busy; it’s not a priority; my ADHD brain is not willing or able to handle the rules, forms, spreadsheets. And besides – what’s to gain? I already have a brilliant publisher; I already make a decent living from poetry.
Truth is – it hurt too much when I don’t win. I have poured myself onto a page and not been chosen. I picture the moment when my poem hits the “reject” pile. For a few days, I know I’m not a good writer. It’s all sham, and my best work is behind me.
I know logically that all this is nonsense. Not being the one entry chosen out of several thousand does not make me a bad writer. As a competition judge myself – with a major poetry competition approaching – I know that the process is subjective, partial. Bad or mediocre poems do not win big prizes – year after year, the Forward, Costa, Booker, Eliot, Manchester, Gregory Prize have rightly celebrated astonishing poetry. But there would have been other astonishing poems in each competition which were not chosen.
It doesn’t matter though, says my brain – I am who I am and I’m not about to change just because it makes sense. So, I don’t enter. I don’t expose myself to an experience I don’t cope well with. But it does trouble me that I subject other people to the same experience. And I feel the responsibility keenly – especially in the later stage of competition, when I’m deciding who makes the short list. Especially when the poetry I am rejecting is about deeply personal experiences, or when a single problematic creative decision means that an otherwise outstanding poem is not selected. I want to contact those writers personally, to tell them what I loved about their poems, what they mean to me.
Kim Moore, Poets who don’t win prizes: how can poetry competitions be more kind?
The airline did give us a voucher for a hotel, and it was a pretty nice one, with meals. So that’s been good. I just have no idea when our flight home will be. As of now, there’s been no update on new tickets.
All this has made me think of waiting. How hard it can be to wait. How disempowering it can feel. Stuck between places. On the verge but maybe not. Your life in someone else’s hands. Floating, adrift.
Building a career as a writer so often involves waiting. Or it feels like it does, anyway. How do you handle it?
I never like waiting. I think that’s why I started Lit Mag News. To build something in the “off” moments. To take charge.
But there are all kinds of ways to handle the psychic stress of waiting. Do you start a new project? Do you try to get the thing you are waiting for out of your mind completely? Do you wait for nothing and no one? Do you maybe wait too much, failing to move forward in the meantime? Are you patient when you must wait? Or are you restless?
I’ve always found working to be the best antidote to the helpless felling of waiting. The hope and thrill of starting something new. So that by the time I hear back from whoever it is, maybe I’m even a bit different than I was before, inches further along in my path or on a new path altogether.
Becky Tuch, How do you cope with waiting?
That pond, put there for a serene view of “nature” is of little more value than a parking lot to that bird and those geese. No native plants at the edge full of seeds and blooms. No duckweed or fish in the water. Likely few if any insects. No real nourishment, just a pond for show, largely devoid of nature’s context.
Everything in us is designed to flourish. Yet we’re pressured to be some version of that pond in our culture—accepted within tight margins, meant to perform as expected, confined by limited variables. I want to embrace the messy complexity that doesn’t neatly fit into a barren pond or a narrow theology, isn’t defined by political rigidity or status or possessions. I want my waters awake with invisible and visible lives. I want my edges lush with everything blooming and going to seed and dying –trusting what needs to flourish will come back to life. I want community, cross-pollination, diversity, beauty. Sometimes, in today’s world, I wonder if we are all the tightly mowed lawn as well as the gull seeking more.
What ways have you found to let the wild living waters of your being and your world flourish?
Laura Grace Weldon, Living Waters
I’ve been following an old pattern […] of breaking up prose labor with poetry-time, drafting new work based on recent travels and on my Dylan reading–you can’t not ponder ambition and what it takes to make it, reading about Dylan’s pilgrimage from Minnesota to Greenwich Village, and that’s a chronic poetic subject of mine. He arrived in New York with zero bigshot connections, a problem he’d soon remedy. Dylan absolutely had the talent and did the work, but he was also intensely image-conscious, partially funded by his parents, and a straight white guy, which made him freer than others. I guess he’d go to Brooklyn now.
My own po-biz activities: not much in sleepy midsummer, but I’m grateful to have two pieces in a new mag, Hood of Bone Review. Both sprang from a grieving time, “Mother Tree” from the months before my mother’s death and “The Facilities” from a dream-encounter with her after. I also just received a copy of a poem in Cimarron Review, pictured below: “Counterphobic” draws from an intensive period of writing spell-poems, in this case pondering curses etched in metal and thrown into wells to petition a local god’s help, of the kind you see in Bath, England. [Insert spell for better US politics here, tossed into the well of blogdom.]
Lesley Wheeler, Talkin’ poetry, music, & ambition
I met Thomas Lux only once when he headlined the Skagit River Poetry Festival. Back then, in the early 2000’s, visiting poets were asked to give craft talks. It seemed very likely that he hadn’t prepared and yet with a great dose of generosity, he talked non-stop for the hour. How could a talk of revision be this riveting?
What I remember most is the image he conjured for us, describing the large circular table where he worked. I don’t know if it was in his home office or in the center of the kitchen, but there were 5 to 8 poems arranged (maybe on clipboards?) that he would work on at the same time. He looked a little embarrassed as he said this and as an aside said this might not work for everyone but for him, he worked “like a dog with a bone,” circling the table and maintaining a strict order.
He did look a little bit like an overgrown golden retriever and perhaps this is why the words have stayed with me so long. I know that Lux was infamous in many ways, and I don’t know what I would’ve thought of him as a professor, but that Saturday afternoon in LaConnor, WA he gave a talk that was more honest, forthcoming, and yes, dazzling, than any talk on revision I have heard.
Maybe it was that even Thomas Lux revises! Maybe it was that he believed so much in circling that table over and over again —- as if he were enacting a magic spell that I was allowed my own revision eccentricities.
Susan Rich, Thomas Lux
A debut pamphlet from Teresa Forrest which explores relationships and heritage with a probing eye that goes beyond personal experience and widens its scope to other lives, reactions to landscape and dislocation. An early poem, “Almost Home”, has a mother talking to her children,
“I, your mother, am formed from folklore,
spit and cabbage. When I made you,
I hadn’t finished making me. I am so rough
around the edges. What worries me
is what’s been left undone.”It ends with the mother asking her children to ask a question. The poem’s speaker shows a self-awareness, able to see herself from her children’s viewpoints. They hear her tell them folk stories, give them a quick ‘spit and polish’ to wipe away dirt or food stains from their faces, and nag them to eat their vegetables. Plus an acknowledgement that she too is a work in progress so doesn’t have all the answers. Readers never discover what the questions are, but there’s a tenderness that implies the mother will be honest and search for an answer if she doesn’t know.
Emma Lee, “The Stories In Between” Teresa Forrest (Five Leaves Publications) – book review
Earlier this week I remarked on Twitter (X, whatever) that I don’t really get ghazals, in the standard English form in which they have become very popular in the last twenty years or so. (And they are extremely popular — there’s one in pretty much every issue of all the poetry magazines I read in English.) Despite their popularity, I couldn’t think of one I had found really convincing as a poem — they all seemed to me too self-conscious and “exercise-y”. I thought this was interesting since generally I enjoy formal dexterity, and this is one of relatively few standard forms you see regularly in contemporary poetry journals. Why have I found so few English examples truly satisfying and successful?
This links with one of my more general preoccupations — what makes the difference between the aesthetically successful importation of a poetic form from one language (and culture) to another, and an attempt that doesn’t come off? I’ve written before about how Ben Jonson tried (and failed) to get Pindaric odes off the ground in English fifty years before Cowley succeeded. And sometimes a short-lived vogue is so clearly delineated that you can date work by it. There’s a kind of Latin poem written in very short (5 syllable) lines which was fashionable in England for just a few decades in the second half of the sixteenth century: the vogue seems to have passed as abruptly as it arose and as a result a scholar can be fairly confident that a poem in this form dates originally from this period.
In 400 years time, might the Anglophone ghazal be this sort of scholars’ friend — if you spot one, you’ll know that you’re almost certainly somewhere between 1995 and 2040? Or is it, by contrast, like the sonnet or the epigram or the verse letter, a form in the process of being ‘domesticated’, with a rich literary future before it?
Victoria Moul, Do ghazals work in English?
As I age and find myself slowing down in my math-poetry ventures it is a delight to see other mathy writers surging with energy and thoughtful publications.
One frequent source of math-arts connections is Sarah Hart, Professor Emerita of Mathematics, School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Birbeck University, London. Here is a link to an article by Hart containing material excerpted from her collection Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature (Flatiron Books: New York, 2023).
Once Upon a Prime is a prose explanation completed with frequent literary examples. Here is a poem that her daughter, Emma, wrote “for Mummy’s book.”
Endless numbers
You could count them till you die
It can outlive the universe
That is Pi.An ongoing source of mathematical outreach is MoMath — New York’s National Museum of Mathematics, a site visited by Sarah Hart — and the museum’s website offers links to lots of math (but not poetry) videos, but only this single picture for Hart’s visit. I did, however, find a sequence of visual slides about Haiku; here is the first (five more here at the MoMath website).
JoAnne Growney, Math can lead us to Poetry . . .
It comes down to, doesn’t it?, the daily countings: the chores, the blessings, the challenges, the joys, the days that have past, those that may remain, dollars left in the wallet, the toes of the new baby, number of days since last period, number of blossoms on the hydrangea, crows on the power line, likes on social media, times you’ve heard no, times you’ve heard yes. I appreciate some poems of appreciation, especially the ones that count the cost.
A friend lent me the latest collection by Jane Hirshfield, and it’s funny, I don’t consider her a touchstone poet for me, for my own growth as a poet, yet this is the second time I’ve featured one of her poems in this blog/podcast. I wonder what keeps me distant on the whole, yet specifically moved. Hm.
Anyway, we take what comforts and excitements where we find them and when. No sense worrying over spilt poems. Let me count the ways I can find what I need in a poem. Here’s one.
I appreciate this poem for its surprises, juxtapositions, its shifts in syntax, its specifics, its softnesses and its edges. I’m lakeside right now on a lake I wrote a poem to many years ago, calling it “a rugged means of grace” (if I may quote myself). I appreciate the ruggedness of grace in this poem, the grace of “this falling world.”
Marilyn McCabe, Then to the questions
Each of the first three lines of the third stanza consists of a cliché / stock phrase, in a manner reminiscent, to me, of Beckett. (Christopher Ricks’s 1993 book Beckett’s Dying Words, OUP, includes the wondrous sentence, ‘Clichés are an opportunity for a writer exactly in being on the face of it nothing to write home about.’) The effect is mildly comedic, a digressive, meta aside, containing the sort of delicately conversational phrasing which workshopping a poem would sadly remove. Then we come to the line ‘our train would pause here’, notable not just for the pause itself, but also because of that ‘our’ which tells the reader that this is a shared reminiscence, and because the echo of ‘Adlestrop’ (‘[. . .] one afternoon / Of heat the express-train drew up there / Unwontedly’) is at its strongest here. Again, the poet surprises with his verb: ‘hesitate forward’ is a perfect oxymoron, not least because the action described so simply is exactly, still, what trains in England do.
Matthew Paul, On Philip Rush’s ‘Shacklegate’
How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
True story! When I was little, one of my greatest entertainments was listening to a recording of Robert Frost reciting “The Witch of Coös,” and in the town library there was an elaborate tableau of “The Death and Burial of Cock Robin” that I loved desperately. I feel like I had an excellent introduction to poetry. I knew those beautiful haunted pieces before anything else.I think those early loves have contributed to why my writing often falls into hybrid space. Some people have described my most recent book, Hatch, as a novella in linked flash fiction pieces and others have described it as prose poetry. (It was published as a poetry collection.) […]
What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Oh goodness: knowing when to stop. I think this is really challenging for a lot of writers! There’s a point where you’re no longer improving a piece, just changing it, and that can go on forever. I think all writers need to learn when they’ve done all they can with a piece and how to let it go.And: be kind. There’s no need for hierarchies, cliques, and bullying.
12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jenny Irish (rob mclennan)
Everyone wants to be published in print-based journals and no one wants to buy them. […] So why not take Candlestick Press’ example and apply it to major journals? They stipulate that (unless you are a concession or suffering financial hardship) any poet who wishes to take part a Candlestick competition should first buy one of their pamphlets. Or what about Rattle, who include a year’s subscription in their admittedly hefty competition entry fee? Or Crannog, who request the purchase of their current issue by any submitter who’s never previously been published by them? This condition also means that the poet in question receives a good dose of contemporary poetry in return for submitting, keeping something tangible that they can read even if their work fails to be accepted.
Matthew Stewart, Poetry submissions in the Submittable era
Underlining, of course, that it’s crucial [to] put in place measures to avoid the problem of potentially excluding poets of limited means (by detailing a list of exemptions), I see no reason why many print-based journals shouldn’t follow a similar policy. Bearing in mind that most magazine guidelines state that poets should read an issue before subbing (and many poets ignore that advice completely), such a system would provide them immediately with loads of excellent preparatory material.
Furthermore, fewer submissions would arrive via Submittable, meaning that editors would no longer be so overwhelmed, while the poets’ engagement with the magazine would also be greater! This process wouldn’t only ensure a greater commitment on the part of the submitting poet,but also longer print runs, stronger sales and continuity of the journal beyond endless funding applications. What do you think?!
If you can’t be bothered to read a print-based magazine, do you deserve to be published by it?!
It has been a crazy-busy week, and (though the Reid-daughter birthdays are finally over for the month), next week is looking no better for this July Mom. But, yes, I am still reading a poetry book each week, and writing about it. This week you can find my review of Matt Hohner’s At the Edge of a Thousand Years (a prize-winner from Jacar Press) at Escape Into Life (EIL).
What else am I reading? About 3 (or 4?) novels at once, which is normal for me. I’m reading a book of poems (of course, more to be revealed when I get the chance). And I’m reading a craft book, Grant Faulkner’s The Art of Brevity, which leaps from astonishment to astonishment. I’ve underlined practically the whole thing.
Bethany Reid, My Poem at Verse Daily
This week I have been revisiting my own story. I’ve been writing about the day I walked away from the creative writing PhD and set a different course for myself, though I didn’t know it then. Then, I felt like the worst kind of failure. A class failure, someone who had tried to climb away from their working class heritage and failed, had returned to the glacial valley of her childhood, was stuck there. […]
Not long after, I began searching for myself. I went on a pilgrimage to find who I really was because somehow I was in my mid forties and didn’t know myself. I began my journey at my daughter’s grave because it was there that I felt, in the intensity of true grief, bone rattling, destroyer-of-all-things grief, that I had felt utterly authentic, a true version of myself.
As I made my way around the lake site, (because this place is what I know of home and home was layered with ghosts of myself) I began deliberately remembering, acknowledging the people that came before me, and that included earlier versions of myself. I was acknowledging, forgiving and loving the earlier versions and finding my place in the landscape.
Wendy Pratt, Here is a Woman Holding a Flint Scraper
i thought i needed
Robin Gow, 7/19
to rid the house of clouds so i bought
a dehumidifier. let it drink the sky.
fill its belly with sweat each day.
instead of helping though,
it draw the centipedes in. they congregated.
they said, “this is my new religion.”
swarms beneath the tank. i told them,
“i am throwing this all
down the drain.” they did not listen.
traveled from far & wide in search
of a severed creek.
Today I wanted to share a few quotations from a book of interviews titled, Listening by Jonathan Cott. He interviews Fellini who says:
“A creative person — let’s say that awful word: an artist — makes what we call magical operations.”
And later, Bob Dylan:
“The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do. What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?”
And then Cott himself says:
“Someone once said that a masterpiece’s function is to create energy for other people to create other masterpieces.”
Back to Dylan: “weirdness is exactness.”
All to say, be weird, be exact, make your masterpieces, create good energy, inspire, uplift, conduct your magical weird operations, you know? Because maybe that is doing one other person some good in this world. And maybe these days that’s an awful lot. It’s dearly needed. Maybe your masterpiece will sink without much fanfare, but maybe one other people will find it to be the wind in their sails. That’s not nothing.
Shawna Lemay, Live Like an Artist – Conduct Magical Operations
we walked to the old van
Paul Tobin, ALL THE WAY TO WAKING
the darkness nestled around us
the soundtrack had yet to be added
we drove in silence all the way to waking
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