A Quote From Audrey Hepburn

For This Past Week, A Poem By Mary Oliver

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

~ Mary Oliver ~

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A Poet Friend Shared An Appropriate Poem About Boston

When I asked a poet friend of mine to send an appropriate poem for this Boston
Marathon tragedy week, she sent this. A poem she read and shared after 9/11.
It speaks to all of us.










Musee des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.


In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.    

Write While Living Your Life

“The problem is, too many writers today are afraid to be still.”

So says Silas House, the author of four novels, several plays and a creative non-fiction book. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/the-art-of-being-still/ Writing in the Opinionator column of The New York Times, House maintains that many of us writers talk about writing, attend conferences, write and cartoon on FB, rather than write.

How do we write as we lead our busy lives? We learn to be still in our heads or House says “to achieve the sort of stillness that allows our senses to become heightened.” Or, as House says quoting Joyce Dyer “seeing like an animal.”

As a writer, when I am stuck in a line at Rite Aid, I challenge myself to come up with the color of the scarf on the lady in front of me, sky blue, the color of the ocean as a thunder storm comes on, the blue of Paul Newman’s eyes? Or is it periwinkle? Turquoise? I am still in my mind. And, serendipitously, I am not writhing with impatience as the line crawls along.

I remember waiting, more than once, for a cross-town bus on 67th and Lexington in New York City. All the other passengers were stepping forward, looking left for the bus, and then returning to the standing position – when is that bus going to arrive? Instead of copying this native practice, I would switch into my writer’s mind and decided to create an image/moment (as Jack Grapes would call it), in my mind. How would I describe The Armory in front of me? What is the light and what are the sounds of this moment. Smells? The costume on the others around me? And their characteristics? I do not write this down. I’m keeping still and engaging in an exercise that keeps me alive as a writer.

I invite all of you to do this. Transform washing the dishes into a writing exercise. How would your main character behave in this exact moment? While driving to the market, who do you see along the way? How are they dressed? What can you tell about these characters by the way they move?

Silas House reiterates all of this, and in a more specific way, in his piece.  HYPERLINK "http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/01/the-art-of-being-still/" Check it out.

House concludes, the age-old truth that we all know somewhere inside of us:  “There is no way to learn how to do this except by simply doing it. We must use every moment we can to think about the piece of writing at hand, to see the world through the point of view of our characters, to learn everything we can that serves the writing….It must be the way we live our lives.”

Exercise: Listen to the rhythm and tone of people talking in elevators, at the table next to you in a café. At the dinner table. Overhear stories. Listen to accents and new words. Every time you hear a new word, look it up, put it in a sentence. And, if in a café, bring out the journal and start writing down what you hear. And, if you are working on a character, imagine him with you at your table. What would he say about that strange looking bum in the corner?

This exercise has as many possibilities as there are moments in our day.

Connect With Your Inner Voice

June is a perfect time to begin a relationship to your inner writer. There are five spots left. Register early and get the discount!

Stealing Like an Artist

So, here’s what happens when you steal like an artist.

Check this out. A 34-year-old Brooklyn artist, Adam Parker Smith “meticulously stole” from 77 artists, “sketchbooks, video, architectural objects, art making devices and more.” These pieces were taken from his favorite artist friends in order to put together a show of their work, called “Thanks.” The artists targeted knew nothing about the show until a couple of weeks before it opened. Many of the artists consigned their works to the gallery so they would get the proceeds of the sale of their work. The gallery owner, Lauren Scott Miller, said she thought of Parker Smith as both curator and conceptual artist: “He’s very thoughtful about each acquisition.” Most of the artists whose work was lifted were amused. “Any difficulty I had that he had breached a trust was overwhelmed by the humor I found in the overall project.” Parker Smith said, “This project has this gimmick that I’m stealing from everybody but it’s really about community.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/arts/design/adam-parker-smiths-thanks-at-lu-magnus-gallery.html

So what does this have to do with writers? Austin Kleon encourages us to steal from our favorite authors, to discover our cultural antecedents and to honor them. In the wonderful, A Different Sun by Elaine Neil Orr, the author acknowledges this debt in the introductory pages of the novel: “I sing praises to my muses.” And then she lists the authors whose work she admires.

Exercise (stolen from my own blog)

Identify an author you admire. Take a couple of pages of her work and break it down. Read it aloud. How does she create sentences? Pronoun the verb—in that order or another? Does she repeat? Is her writing full of metaphor? If so, how does she pull the metaphors onto the page? And then read it aloud again. And again. Print out the magnifying glass and go into the minute details of the workings of this machine. Start a journal entry and, one page in, begin to imitate or “steal from” your designated author. Write in the same rhythm and choose a similar structure to the sentences. Write for three pages. And then go back to your own voice. What have you learned? Read your piece aloud.