Oodgeroo Noonuccal

Understand Old One

What if you came back now
To our new world, the city roaring
There on the old peaceful camping place
Of your red fires along the quiet water,
How you would wonder
At towering stone gunyas high in air
Immense, incredible;
Planes in the sky over, swarms of cars
Like things frantic in flight.

http://www.ict.griffith.edu.au/~davidt/redlandbay/oodgeroo.htm 

Adrienne Rich

Rich wrote, “You must read, and write, as if your life depended on it.”

The Will To Change

Adrienne Rich’s death leaves a hole in the culture that can’t easily be filled.

By Meghan O'Rourke

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/obit/2012/03/adrienne_rich_how_her_work_changed_american_poetry_.single.html

Writer's Block

writer's block (1)

A conversation with Anne Stevenson from The Silent Woman:

p. 107
"... Almost every writer I know has severe depressions."
"... It's when you know you are not fulfilling yourself, when you know you're letting yourself down. To be an artist you have to grant a certain authority to yourself. The critical world wants to deprive you of this authority."

Janet Malcolm 1994 Picador, Australia.

A life in writing: Janet Malcolm 

Anne Stevenson: poet

writer's block (2)

From The Silent Woman

p. 114
"Leafing through the Olwyn-Anne correspondence, I have the sense of being in the company of an old and all too familiar presence, and suddenly, in an intuitive flash, I know what it is. I recognize Olwyn as a personification of the force - sometimes called the resistance - that can keep the writer from writing. She is the voice that whispers in your ear and tells you to put down your pen before she knocks it out of your hand. In letter after letter she tells Anne the withering things that writers tell themselves as they try to write. Seen as a dialogue between the writer's inner voices - the one abusive and scornful, the other defensive and plaintive - the Olwyn-Anne correspondence becomes something more than the trace of a quarrel between two women who should never have worked together."

Janet Malcolm, 1994, Picador, Australia.

A life in writing: Janet Malcolm 

Anne Stevenson: poet


 

writer's block (3)

from The Silent Woman

p. 202
"... the house: a depository of bizarre clutter and disorder ... on every surface hundreds, perhaps thousands, of objects were piled, as if the place were a secondhand shop into which the contents of ten other seconhand shops had been hurriedly crammed, and over everything there was a film of dust: not ordinary transient dust but dust that itself was overlaid with dust - dust that through the years had acquired almost a kind of objecthood, a sort of immancence."
p. 204
Later... it appeared to me as a kind of monstrous allegory of truth. This is the way things are, the place says. This is unmediated actuality, in all its mutliplicity, randomness, inconsistency, redundancy, authenticity. Before the magisterial mess of Trevor Thomas's house, the orderly houses that most of us live in seem meagre and lifeless - as, in the same way, the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life. The house also stirred my imagination as a metaphor for the problem of writing. Each person who sits down to write faces not a blank page but his own vastly overfilled mind ...
The goal is to make a space where a few ideas and images and feelings may be so arranged that a reader will want to linger awhile among them, rather than to flee, as I had wanted to flee from Thomas's house. But this task of housecleaning (of narrating) is not merely arduous; it is dangerous ... throwing the wrong things out and keeping the wrong things in ...  The fear that I felt in Thomas's house is a cousin of the fear felt by the writer who cannot risk beginning to write."

Janet Malcolm, 1994, Picador, Australia.

A life in writing: Janet Malcolm

Simon Caterson

"The finest poetry affects the parts of the mind that other forms of art simply don't reach, though I can't explain exactly how this happens. 'Genuine poetry,' argued T. S. Eliot, 'can communicate before it is understood.' I would describe the impact of poetry to being unexpectedly under the influence of an emotion, such as falling in love. And if we knew what love was, then it would cease to exist."
from In prose of poetry, The Age, 16 January 2005.

'Hoax Nation' by Simon Caterson

Second Chorus from Anouilh's Antigone

"In a tragedy, nothing is in doubt and everyone's destiny is known. That makes for tranquility. There is a sort of fellow-feeling among characters in a tragedy: he who kills is as innocent as he who gets killed: it's all a matter of what part you are playing. Tragedy is restful; and the reason is that hope, that foul deceitful thing, has no part in it. There isn't any hope. You're trapped. The whole sky has fallen on you, and all you can do about it is shout. Don't mistake me: I said 'shout': I did not say groan, whimper, complain. That, you cannot do. But you can shout aloud; you can get at all those things said that you never dared say--or never even knew till then. And you don't say these things because it will do any good to say them: you know better than that. You say them for their own sake; you say them because you learn a lot from them."

http://spaniardintheworks.blogspot.com.au/2007/03/2nd-chorus-from-jean-anouilhs-antigone.html

Anne Stevenson

"The scientist’s spirit of inquiry is not all that different from the poet’s. Keeping the biggest, most basic questions open and mysterious is what makes the disciplines of science and literature exciting in this spoiled, rich western world of the 21st century that can seem so cheap and media-heavy, filled with meaningless chatter."

'My Life in Poetry' by Anne Stevenson: feature written by Anne Stevenson in the May 2010 issue of ARTEMISPoetry.

www.secondlightlive.co.uk 

'The Silent Woman' by Janet Malcolm

p. 63

'Imaginative literature is produced under the pressure of an inner interrogation ... Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.' 

Picador, Australia, 1994.

A life in writing: Janet Malcolm 

Nick Mount on Sylvia Plath's Ariel

Pink Floyd “There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.”

"It is easy to take credit after an idea strikes you, but in fact, neurons in your brain secretly perform an enormous amount of work before inspiration hits."

"a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,

so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out

and stood in the light, lashing his tail."

"our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.”

" poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
under unbearable duress and only with the hope
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument."

from Ars Poetica? Czeslaw Milosz

http://www.cstone.net/~poems/twopomil.htm