Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
"We read poetry because we love it but also because we sense that it’s good for us. It sensitizes us, makes us more aware, opens us up, keeps us sharp – doesn’t it? Lately I’ve had some doubts. Lately I’ve been reading Sylvia Plath"
New edition of Larkin's complete poems, with 350 pages of notes, confirms him as Britain's greatest post-war writer. "He is smarter than we are and more widely read, and much, much funnier, yet fundamentally no different"
Wonderful consideration of "the expression, common to both the arts and science, of the somewhat grand, somewhat ignoble, all too human pursuit of originality in the face of total dependence on the achievements of others"
On ways people work. Poet admits that he does his writing in bed. "And my mother almost married a Serbian composer who used to compose in a bathtub. The thought that he could have been my father both terrifies and delights me"
Death of Wislawa Szymborska ends 60-year golden age of Polish poetry. Milosz and Herbert the other great figures. Under communism, poetry "emerged from its highly pressurised constraints like diamonds forced from carbon"
Revisiting Philip Larkin. "His inclinations were, in almost equal measure, to be confiding and deceptive. He misrepresented his whole career as a poet." To think of him as provincial librarian and part-time poet is misleading
On the poetry of new Nobel prize winner Tomas Tranströmer, whose writing owes more to natural science than literature. Bug collector, psychologist and "probably the most mild and forgiving writer who has ever received the prize"
"An important aesthetic alternative to materialism." If you want to get up to speed on the latest winner of the Nobel prize for literature, here is something to set you on your way
Conversation with author Ben Okri in which he discusses his work and life as a young Nigerian writer in England. "Poetry is probably the most important part of my writing. It’s the foundation; it’s the source of everything else"
On classical text De Rerum Natura and its remarkable story of survival against the odds. Perhaps Ovid was right: “The verses of sublime Lucretius are destined to perish only when a single day will consign the world to destruction"
"Poetry occupies a cultural space in Contemporary American Society somewhere between Tap Dancing and Ventriloquism." So begins a charming, lighthearted set of instructions on how to write the perfect poem to woo your lover
One fine writer dismantles another. While insisting throughout on Murray's genius, Coetzee gently savages Murray's anti-modernism, his "defence of the traditional ways of life", as a hokey mixture of self-deception and self-interest
Image by Digital Agent on Flickr
"When one calls a poet 'Mister', it means Mister So-and-so who has found his way into poetry and has no right to be there"
