What I’m reading #FridayReads

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〉 A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry, by Mary Oliver

bought on impulse from Amazon when shopping for photo albums for Christmas gifts

* Mostly, I just want to give you quotes from this book, which is wonderful. It’s slim, precise, measured, and deeply practical: a book about the poetic craft, with useful examples to illustrate the vocabulary necessary to discuss a poem. If I teach again, I will have my students buy and read this book. I am only sorry I’m so late in finding it. Here is a taste.

I was drawn to this section because she speaks of meditation. It is a different way of looking at the practice:

“We experience the physical world around us through our five senses. Through our imagination and our intelligence, we recall, organize, conceptualize, and meditate. What we meditate upon is never shapeless or filled with alien emotion—it is filled with all the precise earthly things we have ever encountered and all of our responses to them. The task of meditation is to put disorder into order.”

Oliver is a believer in patience and will, time spent in honest labour. She quotes Flaubert: “Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and of intense observation.” She says:

“What a hopeful statement! For who needs to be shy of any of these? No one! How patient are you, and what is the steel of your will, and how well do you look and see the things of this world? If your honest answers are shabby, you can change them. … You can attend to them, you can do better … When people ask me if I do not take pleasure in the poems I have written, I am astonished. What I think of all the time is how to have more patience, and a wilder will—how to see better, and write better.”

How to have more patience, and a wilder will….

xo, Carrie

A knock at the door
On hibernating

2 Comments

  1. Shauna

    Have you listened to her interview with Krista Tippet? That latest On Being episode is a really beautiful interview with her. It made me want to read or reread everything she has written.

    Reply
    • Carrie Snyder

      I haven’t! Thank you for the tip, Shauna. I’ve never heard Mary Oliver’s voice, come to think of it. That sounds like perfect Sunday afternoon listening.

      Reply

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