where I wring out blood…

I’m afraid to write. It’s so dangerous. Anyone who’s tried, knows. The danger of stirring up hidden things – and the world is not on the surface, it’s hidden in its roots submerged in the depths of the sea. In order to write I must place myself in the void. In this void is where I exist intuitively. But it’s a terribly dangerous void: it’s where I wring out blood. I’m a writer who fears the snare of words: the words I say hide others – which? maybe I’ll say them. Writing is a stone cast down a deep well.

Clarice Lispector – A Breath of Life

events entwined with secrecies

So much of life is invisible, inscrutable: layers of thoughts, feelings, outward events entwined with secrecies, ambiguities, ambivalences, obscurities, darknesses strongly present even to the one who’s lived it – maybe especially to the one who’s lived it. I didn’t seek to find her, wandered instead within and among her fragments of language – notebooks, drafts, journals, fictions, letters, essays, and found there whole worlds like spinning planets, lived in their cold light and burning light, wondering where I was, where they might take me.

Laurie Sheck – A Monster’s Notes

The danger of stirring up hidden things

I’m afraid to write. It’s so dangerous. Anyone who’s tried, knows. The danger of stirring up hidden things – and the world is not on the surface, it’s hidden in its roots submerged in the depths of the sea. In order to write I must place myself in the void. In this void is where I exist intuitively. But it’s a terribly dangerous void: it’s where I wring out blood. I’m a writer who fears the snare of words: the words I say hide others – which? maybe I’ll say them. Writing is a stone cast down a deep well. 

Clarice Lispector – A Breath of Life 

Death is our salvation

…death puts an end to our lives but not to our capacity to die: it is real in so far as it ends our living, and illusory as an end to our dying. Hence the paradox – or rather the double paradox … for such is the source of our anguish which does not stem only from the void beyond which, so we are told, human reality emerges to be re-immersed. It stems besides from the suspicion that even this refuge will fail us, since there is not nothing, that this nothing is yet more existence. Since we cannot stop living existence remains unfulfilled, can never be lived to the full: our struggle for life, blind to the fact that it is a struggle for death, traps us in ever dwindling feasibility. Death is our salvation but living is hope. Thus we are never saved, and neither are we ever desperate, and to some extent it is hope that ruins us, hope that is the sign of our despair, so that despair has a kind of liberating value which forces us to go on hoping – not to despair even of what we do not despair is precisely what we call living. 

If each word, image and story signifies its opposite – and the opposite of that opposite as well – this is because of the unique transcendency of death which makes it so attractive, unreal and impossible that it deprives us of the one perfect ending without depriving us of its illusion. Death dominates us, but it dominates us through its impossibility, and this means that we were never born and that we are never present at our death. If we were suddenly to doubt the existence of the night there would be neither night nor day, only a vague twilight, something between a memory of daylight and a yearning for the dark, the end of the sun and the sun of the end. Life is without end, it is an indeterminacy which perhaps excludes us (and in which we therefore try vainly to get a foothold) or perhaps imprisons us without hope (and we desperately seek to evade it). This life is an exile in the worst possible sense: we are not there, we are elsewhere, yet we shall never cease to be there. 

Maurice Blanchot – The Siren’s Song, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch 

sliding into figures of speech

I often think of a poem as a dialogue. Not just between reader and writer but a dialogue with its own history and with the history of its form. Because of the way language accrues meaning through usage, every word has some relation to a past, a record of its public and private usage, where you learned it, how you heard it used or misused, what the contexts were in which you tried it out. Where did you first say “love” or “come” or “here”? How did you arrive at “hunger”— and how did its meaning evolve?  

 
The English language is always sliding into figures of speech — and the complexity and resonance of our usage has to do with how we’ve heard these figures and how we try to shape or inflect them in order to echo those histories or to step away from them in order to mean something else. I want to do both of those things. I like generating and playing on top of echoes. With language the echoes are always there. What’s harder, I think, is when you want to set them aside to articulate a cleaner melody line — which might be closer to what I’m trying to work with in some of my shorter lyric poems, to intensify the line rather than embellish it, to use familiar materials from common usage to generate new patterns.   

Elizabeth Willis – interviewed by Sean Patrick Hill 

our fight to retain a ‘figure’

The female body was never supposed to be smooth, firm and flawless. It was designed to create life, to host life, to feed life.

Yes, there are many other amazing aspects to us all but underpinning our fight to retain a ‘figure’, is a whole network of genetics, science and an entire evolutionary process which wants to create, store and produce fat for protection and hormonal health. If you are losing a battle for slimness, do not for a moment think this is your fault. You are trying to blow away the wind.

Feed yourself well, physically, mentally and spiritually, and then enjoy your life with the vessel you inhabit. It’s a one shot only thing. Peace, laughter and acceptance are the best medicines around.

Donna Ashworth – Words

lost the ability to utter a word

Words bother me. I think it is why I am a poet. I keep trying to force myself to speak of the things that remain mute inside. My poems only come when I have almost lost the ability to utter a word. To speak, in a way, of the unspeakable. To make an object out of the chaos… To say what? A final cry into the void.

Anne Sexton – August 2^nd 1963 letter to Brother Dennis Farrel

the unspeakable

Words bother me. I think it is why I am a poet. I keep trying to force myself to speak of the things that remain mute inside. My poems only come when I have almost lost the ability to utter a word. To speak, in a way, of the unspeakable. To make an object out of the chaos… To say what? A final cry into the void.

Anne Sexton – Letter dated 2nd August 1963 to Brother Dennis Farrel

the closest thing we have to true magic

Writing, if nothing else, is a bridge between two people, a bridge made of language. And language belongs to all of us. If I enjoy a poem, that just means I am recognizing within it something of myself, something I must already possess. Therefore, to love a poem is to love a part of myself revealed to me by another person…I really believe that writing is the closest thing we have to true magic. Where else, but in words, can we discover each other out of thin air?

Ocean Vuong – Interviewed by Tanya Olson, 16^th February 2016

Writing

“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”

Annie Proulx – The Paris Review: Spring 2009

William Faulkner wrote The Sound and the Fury five separate times, “trying to tell the story, to rid myself of the dream.” “It began with a mental picture,” he told Jean Stein in 1956, “of the muddy seat of a little girl’s drawers in a pear tree.” He couldn’t seem to get it right, to find the picture’s grammar, or hear it. (According to Didion, “It tells you. You don’t tell it.”) This was part of the work, this getting it wrong — Faulkner believed failure was what kept writers going, and that if you ever could write something equal to your vision, you’d kill yourself. In his own Paris Review interview, Ted Hughes tells a story about Thomas Hardy’s vision of a novel — “all the characters, many episodes, even some dialogue — the one ultimate novel that he absolutely had to write” — which came to him up in an apple tree. This may be apocryphal, but I hope it isn’t. (I imagine him on a ladder, my filigree on the myth.) By the time he came down “the whole vision had fled,” Hughes said, like an untold dream. We have to write while the image is shimmering.

Elisa Gabbert – Why write?

“I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed – that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn’t lost.”  

Jeanette Winterson – Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?