A Writer's Moment: 'First make something'

A Writer's Moment: 'First make something':   “The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communic...

'First make something'

 

“The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate.” – James Schuyler

 

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Schuyler was born in Chicago in November of 1923 and became a central member of the “New York School” of poets in the 1960s and ‘70s, publishing his first major work Freely Espousing in 1969.  His Pulitzer-winner The Morning of the Poem appeared in 1980.   For Saturday’s Poem here is Schuyler’s,

 

Poem (The Day Gets Slowly Started)

The day gets slowly started.
A rap at the bedroom door,
bitter coffee, hot cereal, juice
the color of sun which
isn’t out this morning. A
cool shower, a shave, soothing
Noxzema for razor burn. A bed
is made. The paper doesn’t come
until twelve or one. A gray shine
out the windows. “No one
leaves the building until
those scissors are returned.”

It’s that kind of a place.
Nonetheless, I’ve seen worse.
The worried gray is melting
into sunlight. I wish I’d
brought my book of enlightening
literary essays. I wish it
were lunch time. I wish I had
an appetite. The day agrees
with me better than it did, or,
better, I agree with it. I’ll
slide down a sunslip yet, this
crass September morning.

A Writer's Moment: 'By the seeds that you plant'

A Writer's Moment: 'By the seeds that you plant':   “Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” – Robert Louis Stevenson Born in Edinburgh, Scotlan...

'By the seeds that you plant'

 

“Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland on this date in 1850, Stevenson became one of the world’s most versatile and “translated” authors, creating a remarkable body of work in his short life (he died of a stroke at age 44).   He left us with classics like Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, plus a host of great characters like the pirate Long John Silver, and Jekyll and Hyde (also a lasting descriptive phrase).   

 

Stevenson’s creativity also included essays, dozens of short stories, and poetry for both adults and children (A Child’s Garden of Verses – with lasting poems like My Shadow: “I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.”), and music.   An accomplished pianist, he wrote or arranged more than 120 original pieces for various combinations of flageolet, flute, clarinet, violin, guitar, mandolin, and piano, including ten songs written to his own poetry. 

 “The difficulty of literature is not to write,” Stevenson said, “but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.”

A Writer's Moment: 'It's the most astonishing creation'

A Writer's Moment: 'It's the most astonishing creation' :   “What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dar...

'It's the most astonishing creation'

 

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you.” – Carl Sagan

 

Born in New York City in November 1934, Sagan was an astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist and astrobiologist who also wrote more than 600 articles and authored, co-authored or edited 20 books.  His novel Contact was the basis for a popular movie, and he co-wrote and narrated the first series of Cosmos, the most widely watched series in the history of American public television.  

 

A gifted student, he finished high school by age 15 and earned three degrees from the University of Chicago before age 25 after “self-teaching” himself the ins and outs of the sciences while still in junior high school.  His first nationally published articles started appearing in the mid-to-late 1950s and his first book about organic matter on the moon was published in 1961.

 

Sagan died of pneumonia at the relatively young age of 61 but just before his death he spoke these words about books and writing:

 

“Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." 

A Writer's Moment: It's a 'mysterious, surprising act'

A Writer's Moment: It's a 'mysterious, surprising act':   “The act of writing surprises me all the time. A miraculous thing happens when you have an idea and you want to convert it into words . . ...