A Writer's Moment: 'It's what a poem can offer'

A Writer's Moment: 'It's what a poem can offer':   “We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you...

'It's what a poem can offer'

 

“We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.” – Tracy K. Smith

 

Smith, who was born in Massachusetts on April 16, 1972, started writing poetry as a 5^th grader and became our nation’s 22^nd Poet Laureate (2017-19) and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her poems Life On Mars.   For Saturday’s Poem here is Smith’s,

 

                                                            The Good Life

When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.

 

A Writer's Moment: 'Driven to communicate'

A Writer's Moment: 'Driven to communicate': A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate . . . to share . . . to be understood." ...

'Driven to communicate'

A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate . . . to share . . . to be understood." -  Leo Rosten

Born on April 10, 1908, Rosten was a novelist, scriptwriter and humorist who also had a deep interest in the relationship of politics and the media and the intricacies of their connections.  

 

An immigrant from Russia who grew up in New York City, he worked his way through school, earning a doctorate degree from the University of Chicago.   After starting his career as an economist while  simultaneously writing stories for The New Yorker and Look magazines, he took on a series of government information jobs during WWII and wrote the first of his screenplays, The Conspirators.  From 1944 to 1987, the year of his death, he wrote more than three dozen books, numerous feature stories and essays, and was a much sought-after speaker.

 

His quotes often were shared, including this one (a version of which is often mis-attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson):  

 

"The purpose of life . . . is to be useful; to be honorable . . . to be compassionate . . . to matter; to have it make some difference that you have lived."

A Writer's Moment: Showing 'ordinary people in extraordinary moments'

A Writer's Moment: Showing 'ordinary people in extraordinary moments':   “I don't like poetry that doesn't give me a sense of ritual, but I don't like poetry that doesn't sound like people talkin...

Showing 'ordinary people in extraordinary moments'

 

“I don't like poetry that doesn't give me a sense of ritual, but I don't like poetry that doesn't sound like people talking to each other. I try to do both at once.” – Miller Williams

 

Born in Hoxie, Arkansas on April 8, 1930, Williams planned to become a natural scientist – especially working with animals – and earned a master’s degree in zoology.  But, ultimately, his love of writing got in the way of his planned career.  By the time of his death in 2015 he had produced nearly 40 books, created and read a poem at the Presidential Inauguration of fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton, and helped found The University of Arkansas Press.

 

He had his first collection of poems Et Cetera published while he was still an undergraduate student in biology at Arkansas State University.  His treatise on writing poetry, Making a Poem: Some Thoughts About Poetry and the People Who Write It, is regularly studied in colleges and universities around the world.   A critic once wrote that Miller had "a terrible honesty" and "(wrote) about ordinary people in the extraordinary moments of their lives."   

 

Among his many awards were the Porter Prize Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement in Writing, the National Poets’ Prize – for his collection Living on the Surface – and the National Arts Award for his lifelong contribution to the arts. 

 

“I respond to mood. I hear some phrase, or pick up a rhythm,” he once said of his writing style.  “I always have pen and paper with me.”

A Writer's Moment: 'Look through the eyes of another person'

A Writer's Moment: 'Look through the eyes of another person':   “Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.”...