'A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary'

"My employer had made good on the promise of a proper desk. It turned out to be an ideal spot in which to do some work,for it rendered the idea of writing so unlikely as to make it possible again. Objectively good places to work rarely end up being so; in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studies have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming. Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way - towards a busy street or terminal - before they run out of their burrows." p. 42


"But the writer's desk was at heart an open invitation to users of the terminal to begin studying their setting with a bit more imagination and attention, to give weight to the feelings that airports provoke, but which we are seldom able to sort through or elaborate upon in the anxiety of making our way to the gate." p. 44

By Alain de Botton, 2009
A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary'
Profile Books, London

http://alaindebotton.com/

http://www.profilebooks.com/ 
 
 


 

Ken Loach

'He stayed outside the establishment cliques, and I think that if you're any kind of artist in whatever kind of medium, whether it's painting or writing or theatre or film, you have no place in the establishment cliques. You have to be an outsider.'

Ken Loach speaking on influence of 18th-century satirical painter William Hogarth on his work.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/video/2013/nov/28/ken-loach-how-william-hogarth-inspired-riff-raff-video 

Brenda Ueland

"Why should we all use our creative power ... ? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money."

Brenda Ueland wrote the book "If You Want to Write" more than 75 years ago. In it she sanctions aimless wandering walking and staring out the window as work for the writer. 

https://www.graywolfpress.org/author-list/brenda-ueland 


 

mslexia - for women who write

New Writing: 2013 Women's Poetry Competition 

Kathleen Jamie introduces her selection of winning poems

"It’s always difficult being faced with a heap of poems, all in different fonts, with different margins, and code numbers handwritten in the corner. I prefer approaching poems one at a time, as you would if you encountered them in a book; then each poem can take its time, find its own level. That’s why proper book-making is so important for poetry, because it situates poems with care and attention on the page, and why internet publishing is a poor option."

 https://www.mslexia.co.uk

Kathleen Jamie: a life in writing

"When we step outside and look up, we're not little cogs in the capitalist machine. It's the simplest act of resistance and renewal."

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/apr/06/kathleen-jamie-life-in-writing 

"A New Earth" Eckhart Tolle

"I have also met many others who may be technically good at what they do but whose ego constantly sabotages their work. Only part of their attention is on the work they perform; the other part is on themselves. Their ego demands personal recognition and wastes energy in resentment if it doesn't get enough - and it's never enough. 'Is someone else getting more recognition than me?' Or their main focus of attention is profit or power, and ther work is no more than a means to that end. When work is no more than a means to an end, it cannot be of high quality. When obstacles or difficulties arise in their work, when things don't go according to expectation, when other people or circumstances are not helpful or cooperative, instead of immediately becoming one with the new situation and responding to the requirements of the present moment, they react against the situation and so separate themselves from it. There is a 'me' that feels personally offended or resentful, and a huge amount of energy is burned up in useless protest or anger, energy that could be used for solving the situation if it were not being misused by the ego. What is more, this 'anti'-energy creates new obstacles, new opposition. Many people are truly their own worst enemy.

People unknowingly sabotage their own work when they withhold help or information from others or try to undermine them lest they become more successful or get more credit than 'me'. Cooperation is alien to the ego, except when there is a secondary motive. The ego doesn't know that the more you include others, the more smoothly things flow and the more easily things come to you. When you give little or no help to others or put obstacles in their path, the universe - in the form of people and circumstances - gives little or no help to you because you have cut yourself off from the whole. The ego's unconscious core feeling of 'not enough' causes it to react to someone else's success as if that success had taken something away from 'me'. It doesn't know that your resentment of another person's success curtails your own chances of success. In order to attract success, you need to welcome it wherever you see it. "

http://www.eckharttolle.com/

Emily Riall

"We often talk approvingly about young writers who ‘find their voice early’, without actually saying what we mean by it. Emily’s poems are a triumphant case study of that process in action.

First of all, she had found her subject. Most of what you will read in A Sinkful of Sky concerns the territory of mental illness. Without demeaning the seriousness of that topic, I would however say her real subject is the gaps between people, their silences and hesitations and the limiting effect of language on communication. Far from overwhelming her, she tackled these themes with great vigour and daring.
Secondly, Emily’s poems are minor miracles of precision. There isn’t a poem in her book which does not know when to stop. She seemed to have learned at a very early age that good poems trust their reader, providing them with information, yes, but also with space. Some writers can take years to learn this, but Emily apprehended it young, with laser-like self-knowledge."

Anthony Wilson,  September 15, 2013
http://anthonywilsonpoetry.com/2013/09/15/lifesaving-poems-emily-rialls-duty-psychiatrist/ 

UA Fanthorpe

"Ursula Fanthorpe was born in Kent in 1929, read English at St Anne's College, Oxford, and taught at Cheltenham Ladies' College. 

What stung her into poetry was her experience as a medical receptionist at a Bristol neurological hospital where she worked after she had left Cheltenham. 

In the introduction to her Collected Poems Fanthorpe dates the beginning of her poetry career precisely. "On 18 April 1974 I started writing poems". 

From the beginning she sided with the patients against the doctors, a characteristic stance. She observed the gallery of characters who passed before her en route to the doctors and made poetry from their raw troubles. 

There was no sense of appropriation in this – everything Fanthorpe touched in poetry was handled with dignity. 

She said: "At once I'd found the subject that I'd been looking for all my life: the strangeness of other people, particularly neurological patients, and how it felt to be them, and to use their words."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/u-a-fanthorpe-poet-who-championed-the-underdog-and-whose-work-was-rooted-in-english-history-1677685.html 

fear of writing

Sarah Dunant

"… within the writing there is a huge amount of pain, there is. You get lost, you don’t know what you're doing. You get frightened. You don’t think you can do it. I’ve written 12 books now and I’ve begun to realise that getting lost, being terrified, knowing this is the one I will not write, is all part of the process … quite a commitment to put yourself through … "

Jane Sullivan

"… there are always moments when you think, ‘what am I doing? this is a complete and utter waste of time, why do I fool myself into thinking I can write anything at all? this is a disaster, I’ll never do this again.’ And somehow you rise up out of that and you go on."

Melbourne Writer's Festival

History's Script

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandartsdaily/mwf3a-history27s-script/4912488 

sarahdunant.com

http://janesullivan.com.au/

democratic art and literature

"The slow fermentation of democratic spirit within significant sections of the American population was palpable. The ethos of equality with liberty guaranteed by elections was inscribed in their simple body language, tobacco-chewing habits and easy manners, their bold dreams and high expectations, their self-consciously democratic art and literature - for instance, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855), a celebration of the potential boundlessness of the American experiment with democracy and the power of the poet to rupture conventional language, and the greatest of all nineteenth-century American novels, Hermann Melville's Moby Dick (1851), a tale that warned against the hubris and self-destruction that awaits all those who act as if the world contains no boundaries, rules or moral limits." 

John Keane, 2009, The Life and Death of Democracy, Simon & Schuster
http://johnkeane.net/books/the-life-and-death-of-democracy/about-the-book

Walt Whitman 'Leaves of Grass'

'snowbound'

'snowbound', a photo by brian hefele on Flickr.

In Praise of Journals that Publish Poetry and their Editors

"In a country that highlights Capitalism wherever it can, poetry journals have become a peaceful protest against money first. 

The majority of literary journals in this country(and other countries even more so) are done on a lima bean budget. The editors I know devote late night hours each week to reading, editing, corresponding, fact checking and producing attractive magazines --- with no ad money.
 
In other words: editors are good people. They believe in the radical notion that poetry matters."

http://thealchemistskitchen.blogspot.com.au/2013/06/in-praise-of-journals-that-publish.html?spref=bl 

I never give up or consider not trying

Poem 3, a photo by robert.juergens on Flickr.

It was a magical day in Humbug County

I Ate At The Starvation Army, a photo by Jeremy Brooks on Flickr.

in the small space

" ... on the second of March, 1959 ... in Columbia Records' 30th Street Studio, New York, Miles Davis was recording his jazz masterpiece Kind of Blue ... I think of it sometimes when I listen to Kind of Blue, how the trumpet player took into the studio with him that day all his anger and pride. How he had been working hard for years, practising his art, learning that genius might lie in the small space allowed to someone between his limitations. How he was ready that day, and the world was ready for him - how simple that sounds and yet how rare it really is. " 

source unknown

'Disgrace' J.M. Coetzee, 1999

Vintage Books, London, 2011

p. 3
"Although he devotes hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: 'Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings and intentions to each other.' His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul."  

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n20/elizabeth-lowry/like-a-dog

http://www.salon.com/1999/11/05/coetzee/

http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/11/28/reviews/991128.28gorrat.html

David Shrigley

" ... the way I make work is that I discard the majority of it, the vast majority of it - sort of a way of taking the pressure off any individual drawing, knowing the likelihood is that it will be thrown in the bin. I guess that's the key to doing anything in a way, is to convince yourself you're doing something else. If you have to write an essay or something you'll always end up hoovering the living room."

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/booksandartsdaily/david-shrigley27s-how-are-you-feeling3f/4739544

http://www.davidshrigley.com/

http://www.antonkerngallery.com/artist/david-shrigley/#/hello-there

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/01/david-shrigleys-signs-of-life.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/david-shrigleys-fine-line-between-art-and-fun-nominated-for-turner-prize-8587267.html

Kate Tempest: spoken word performer

RN Late Night Live
Phillip Adams inerviews Kate Tempest

PA: "... been so welcomed by the world of arts, haven't you? There's been no barriers put up ..."
KT: "I think I've been hammering those barriers down incessantly - the arts - they really didn't have a choice - I've been doing it and doing it ..." 


KT: "The only difference between a writer who dreams of being a writer and a writer being a writer is finishing something - as soon as it's finished you can move on - you get better - it might be awful - but you can move on."

 http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/kate-tempest2c-performance-poet/4696900

http://katetempest.co.uk/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/10/kate-tempest-performance-poet-cant-be-ignored

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/09/11/kate-tempest-poet-interview_n_1874317.html

http://www.live-magazine.co.uk/2012/08/behind-the-scenes-with-kate-tempest-and-live-magazine/

W. B. Yeats

"Nowadays, whether he is thought of as a national bard or a world poet, Yeats figures in the mind as a translated force, an energy released and a destiny fulfilled.

Still, as a poet with a strong histrionic streak and a readiness to identify himself with variously anti-establishment  and anti-populist causes in the course of a long lifetime, Yeats was never without his detractors. Yet from the beginning, those most intent upon debunking the man or demythologizing the poet could never deny that his commitments were as selfless as they were ardent. Neither George Moore (Yeat's senior) nor James Joyce (his junior) ever doubted that the phenomenon known as the Irish Literary Revival represented the execution of high artistic purpose, although both of them found fault with Yeats's ways of discharging that purpose. Moore, as a fellow member of the middle-class, mocked him for affecting a Renaissance  hauteur and for getting carried away by his aristocratic fantasies. Joyce, more indigent and less socially advantaged, was oddly enough enraged by what he perceived as the poet's downward mobility ...

What Joyce could not know, of course, was that a new, convulsive energy was building in the poet as the effort to bind himself to a national purpose - 'Theatre business, management of men' - collided with his antithetical and more powerful drive to assert the claims of individual personality over every solidarity. A decade later, in Responsibilities (1914) and The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), a poetry of singular clarity and detachment would spring from the tension generated in him between his ideal of service to a new, imagined Ireland and his recognition of the demeaned standards actually preferred by the Ireland in which he was living. It all contributed to the emergence of a new poetic voice, intellectually pugnacious, emotionally renovated and rhetorically high-spirited."

from Introduction, by Seamus Heaney
W. B. Yeats: Poems selected by Seamus Heaney
2000 Faber and Faber, London  

Virginia Woolf

"And just as she tells the history of the lives of women in this country in very emotional terms, so she describes writing, and reading, of novels, as a very emotional business. ‘A novel starts in us all sorts of antagonistic and opposed emotions.’ Novels are made up of ‘many different kinds of emotions’: and so are readings of novels, where ‘our private prejudices’ have ‘an immense sway’ upon us. What she is trying to work out is what kind of emotions have gone into the writing of women’s novels, and why, and what kind of emotions they have been read with. And, finally, whether these complicated feelings, in writers and readers, can change. A vital part of the argument of A Room of One’s Own is that literature – the writing and reading of it – can’t be separated out from our social or economic conditions, our material environment, our upbringing or our education. This is a pragmatic, realist, political approach to art, not (as it so often said of Woolf) an elitist or escapist one."

"When, early on in the book, she’s thinking about Charles Lamb’s essays, she thinks of ‘that wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry'."

"Jerks, flashes, and checks, interrupt her own narrative: ‘the flash of some terrible reality’ in the garden at Fernham, brutally interrupted by the arrival of the soup …

thoughts on the psychology of sex interrupted by the necessity of paying the bill; the torn web of women’s fictions; the obstacles and impediments to their work; the ‘bursting’ and ‘splitting’ and ‘barring’ in Lady Winchilsea’s writing; the ‘awkward break’ in Jane Eyre which allows in Charlotte Bronte’s anger ... "

"Yet the overall effect of A Room of One’s Own is smoothness and control, of a writer who knows where she is going. And since what Woolf is recommending, or hoping for is a woman’s writing which will get beyond awkward jerking and breaks into the calm and integrity and fusion of an ‘androgynous’ writing, which doesn’t have to be self-conscious or angry or broken-backed …"

"As Woolf says, once the woman writer is free, she is going to ‘knock’ the novel ‘into shape for herself’. That’s exactly what Woolf is doing here. She is making ‘a shape for herself’ which no one else has ever invented (part fiction, part essay, part conversation, part history, part meditation) in order to provide a space – a room of her own, which is this book – for a story about women."

from Introduction by Hermione Lee (2001)

Vintage Books, London

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

http://www.hermionelee.com/ 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/hermionelee 

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91r/

'social relevance for poetry'

The Australian poet Michael Thwaites, who died at the age of 90 in 2005, worked for Australia's security intelligence organisation (ASIO) for twenty years.  After his WWII naval service he lectured for three years at Melbourne University and then received a recruitment call from ASIO's director-general Charles Spry:
"You write poetry, I know. Much of the job will just be hard methodical work but imagination is also needed. I believe you could make a valuable contribution."
   

http://michael.thwaites.com.au/

digital.slv.vic.gov.au/dtl_publish/pdf/marc/23/1011391.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2005/nov/18/guardianobituaries.australia

'every poet and every artist is an anti-social being'

"The point is, art is something subversive. It's something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things one must steal, to be used against the established order. Once art becomes official and open to everyone, then it becomes the new academicism."

"If art is ever given the keys to the city, it will be because it's been so watered down, rendered so impotent, that it's not worth fighting for."

"And why did Plato say poets should be chased out of the republic? Precisely because every poet and every artist is an anti-social being. He's not that way because he wants to be ...
the right to free expression is something one seizes, not something one is given. It isn't a principle one can lay down as something that should exist ...
If the idea of society is to dominate the idea of the individual, the individual must perish. Furthermore, there wouldn't be such a thing as a seer if there weren't a state trying to suppress him. It's only at that moment, under that pressure, that he becomes one. People reach the status of artist only after crossing the maximum number of barriers. So the arts should be discouraged, not encouraged."

p. 189
'Life with Picasso'
Francoise Gilot & Carlton Lake, 1964, Thomas Nelson

'The Angry Genius of Les Murray'

"Though he has at various times held university fellowships, Murray has little good to say about what goes on in the literature classroom. Academic literary critics are, to him, heirs of an Enlightenment hostile to the creative spirit. Behind its mask of the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, he sees the Enlightenment itself as a cabal of rootless, disaffected clercs scheming to grasp power, usually by controlling the fashion for what may or may not be said in public ('political correctness'). Universities have been turned by the Enlightenment into 'humiliation mills' that grind out generations of students ashamed of their social origins, alienated from their native culture, recruits to a new metropolitan class whose Australian manifestation Murray dubs 'the Ascendancy.' The term is meant to capture both the 'foreign-derived oppressiveness' of the new class and its 'arriviste, first-generation flavour.' The Ascendancy is 'the natural upper class of a socialist world order'; holding a university degree is the modern equivalent of being a landowner."
p. 139
The Best Australian Essays 2012, Black Inc.
J. M. Coetzee, 'Les Murray and the Black Dog'
first appeared as 'The Angry Genius of Les Murray' in New York Review of Books, 29 September 2011

Lines of Life: 101 Poems by 101 Women

"Within the covers of this small book every reader will find something to deplore ... 

Poetry is strange stuff and over the centuries it has got stranger. Five hundred or so years ago any gentleman was expected to be able to pen on demand a respectable sonnet to his mistress' eyebrow, but by the beginning of the nineteenth century poetry had been transformed from an elegant accomplishment to a savage destiny, a sacred and sublime vocation, not to be attempted by anyone who shrank at the prospect of madness, destitution and death. Women had struggled to be poets when what was needed was the education that they had not got, and they continued to struggle to be poets when what was demanded was egomania of delusional proportions. Post-modernism has taken some of the pressure off; irony is a medium that women have always understood."

from Germaine Greer's introduction to Lines of Life: 101 Poems by 101 Women, edited by Germain Greer, published by Faber and Faber, 2001

https://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/germaine+greer/lines+of+life/5302359/

Finding the rhythm.

from A Regular Maverick by Sean O'Hagan, 23 February 2013, The Saturday Age, Life & Style, p. 12

"How, then, does he actually prepare for a role? 'Well, it's not something I could fully articulate,' he says, 'but basically I prepare in the same way every time. I take the script, I stand in my kitchen and I quietly mumble it to myself. Over and over.' Is he being serious? 'Oh yes. See, I keep doing that until I hear something in there. I was trained as a dancer and that stuck with me, so I'm essentially looking for a rhythm. When I figure stuff out, it has to do with finding the rhythm. Always.'"

http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/videos/off-the-cuff-an-extended-interview-with-christopher-walken-20130204 

Philip Harvey - Poetry Editor - Eureka Street

Philip Harvey - Poetry Editor - Eureka Street

from Philip Harvey's report on 2012 Annual Poetry Competition organised by Poetica Christi Press, http://www.poeticachristi.org.au/home.html

"We want our poem to express pretty much exactly what we want to say. But if we make it too obvious then our thoughts and feelings will come out sounding simplistic and untested, or gushy, even flakey. While the more we try to impress, our expression can become obscure, overly artful, and even pretentious. How to manage to express truly and impress effectively while remaining true to our own origianl desires when making poetry is, I believe, a recurring state. It is our creative condition, cause for us to continue trying new ways of making words work. Our essential human need to talk of the spirit ..."

The Best Australian Poems 2012

Black Inc., Collingwood, Australia
http://www.blackincbooks.com/books/subject/poetry 

Editor: John Tranter
From Introduction, p. xiv

"Readers like to become involved in a good story, and many poems work like stories, only of course in a briefer compass. There was a time when poems were longer: much longer. They needed to be. If you were stuck in a cave all winter long, sitting around the campfire at night with a few smelly sheep for company, you would want the visiting storyteller to spin his stories out for several months. So the ancient epics were suitably long and dramatic to ensure that the travelling bard got dozens of good feeds before his audience grew tired of his tale.

That was before the mass-produced printed novel was developed, bringing huge audiences with it. Most people in Europe could read, by then, so novels became widely popular. Then the movies arrived to entertain everybody. You didn't need to be able to read, even, with radio, or the movies, or television. So as the decades passed, long narrative poetry, as the best means of reciting a memorised story, quietly faded away. 

But somehow, poetry hung on, in its niche. I was struck, in reading through over a thousand entries for this year's Best Australian Poems, by just how many poems depended on the ancient devices of the storyteller."

from 'Riding the Trains in Japan'

    "Stranger than her clothes was that, like the Mosuo girl I had met back in the old town in Lijiang, Numa Lamu sang constantly. She would sing under her breath, then launch into song at the top of her voice without a shred of embarrassment ...
The most consistent difference I have found between peole who remain attached to pre-modern traditions and we moderns is our neglect of song. For us, art is a thing that professionals make according to the tastes and disposable income of an educated middle class; for them it is common and vital, like breathing.
     Numa Lamu began a song that rose up and down a scale erratically and then settled into soft breaking notes. She ladled another cup of milk butter tea. 
     What a people for our world, I thought. Pray God it never finds them."

Patrick Holland 2011
Riding The Trains In Japan: Travels In The Sacred And Supermodern East
Transit Lounge, Yarraville, Australia
p. 143