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“The conundrum of a writer’s life, particularly that of a poet’s, is learning to embody a paradox,” says Rita Dove, winner of the 2018 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, in this recording of the Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Lecture at the Kenyon Review Literary Festival. “One has to be fierce and tender at the same time. Loud and quiet. Brash and introspective.”
The author of Country of Origin listens to old-school Arabic music to help her render the mood of Egypt at the dawn of the postcolonial period.
“Even when I was starving, I was eating. Inhaling words like a kid with a lunch card, like this is a meal I might miss,” reads Natasha Carrizosa from her poem “ABC ME” at Station Museum in Houston, Texas for Write About Now Poetry.
In this video, Shane McCrae reads his poem “Jim Limber on the Gardens of the Face of God” from his collection Sometimes I Never Suffered (Corsair, 2020), which was shortlisted for the 2020 T. S. Eliot Prize.
“My problem isn’t writer’s block—it’s writer’s doubt,” writes Diana Marie Delgado in an installment of Writers Recommend in which she explains how a hypnotic and emotionally swelling piece of music helps inspire her writing. “If I feel overwhelmed, I listen to William Basinski’s ‘dlp 1.1’ from The Disintegration Loops,” she writes. This week, write about a piece of music that helps you enter the headspace for writing. What’s the story behind the music, and what about it, specifically, helps you write?
“Last to the podium was Muriel Rukeyser, / who once wrote her own Smartian vow: ‘Never / to despise in myself what I have been / taught to despise, and never to despise the other.’” The late Galway Kinnell reads from his poem “Jubilate” and discusses the work and impact of poet Muriel Rukeyser with Sharon Olds in this Paris Press video celebrating Rukeyser’s book of essays, The Life of Poetry.
From New York socialite con artist Anna Delvey to Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the fraudulent health technology company Theranos, to Simon Leviev, who allegedly conned millions of dollars from women through the dating app Tinder, these actors of true crime have dominated the subject of several television shows, documentaries, and movies. Inspired by these dangerous tricksters, write a story with a con artist as the protagonist. What do they think and sound like? Do they have an unrecognizable accent or use popular social media platforms to connect with their victims?
“I had a dream of having poetry at the intersections of New York, where all kinds of people pass through daily,” says Marie Howe, former New York State poet laureate, in this 2015 video about the inspiration for the Poetry in Motion: The Poet Is In festival. The annual National Poetry Month event is hosted by the Poetry Society of America and MTA Arts & Design, and features poems written on request by award-winning poets.
“[Nashville] is hot chicken on sopping white bread with green pickle / chips—sour to balance prismatic, flame-colored spice / for white people,” writes Tiana Clark in her poem “Nashville,” published in the New Yorker in 2017. The poem interlaces personal experience and anecdotes with a historical overview of the Southern city’s development. “I-40 bisected the black community / like a tourniquet of concrete. There were no highway exits. / 120 businesses closed,” writes Clark. Write a poem about a city you’ve lived in. How does your time there intersect with the history of the town? Use research to find significant events that take your poem to a deeper place beyond your own life.
“If you don’t know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it.” In this TED Talk, Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Anchor Books, 1995), shares twelve truths she’s learned from life and her writing.
