Seek Giacometti’s “The Palace at 4 a.m.” Go back two hours. See towers and curtain walls of matchsticks, marble, marbles, light, cloud at stasis. Walk in. The beggar queen is dreaming on her throne of words… You have arrived at the web home of Marly Youmans, maker of novels, poems, and stories, as well as the occasional fantasy. D. G. Myers: "A writer who has more resolutely stood her ground against the tide of literary fashion would be difficult to name."
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SAFARI seems to no longer work
Friday, April 08, 2016
A Throne in April
7 comments:
Alas, I must once again remind large numbers of Chinese salesmen and other worldwide peddlers that if they fall into the Gulf of Spam, they will be eaten by roaming Balrogs. The rest of you, lovers of grace, poetry, and horses (nod to Yeats--you do not have to be fond of horses), feel free to leave fascinating missives and curious arguments.
1. Well, this person adored poetry as a small child and loved playing with words. She found a deep pleasure.
ReplyDeleteThat's one answer. There are many others. But that is the most practical one.
2. Something like a waterfall out of a distant star fell on me repeatedly, and I turned it into words.
3. I cannot actually tell you why I was made a poet because it is secret, and secrets must be kept.
There you go--three answers, rather peculiar and perhaps annoying!
People become writers for all sorts of reasons, many of them rather poor reasons in my estimation, judging by the books. But human beings are made in such a way that they want to be creative, whether that means teaching an artful class or painting or designing software or whatever.
ReplyDeleteIt is extremely odd how powerful it is in certain cases--I always think of Melville, turning ninety with almost all recognition lost, and still shaping words into patterns.
I would say that writing, at its best, enlarges the spirit of the writer. And that is a thing that is very hard to resist for some.
I'm not a biography fan, so I don't know about Stevens's use of time during his work days. But I expect he was one of those people who is capable of sudden and intense concentration, a thing that is very helpful to a working person who wants to write (and also helpful at home, with children batting around the house and making child-noise!)
ReplyDeleteThe Fante quote is pretty accurate, although sometimes it takes something good a long time to be seen. As for the others, there are some I like and some that I don't.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, it doesn't matter what a writer says about his/her own work or about writing in general. I mean, sometimes they're totally wrong about their own work, or they say things they don't quite believe because they're suddenly on the spot.
It's the work and what the work itself reveals about what poetry or stories are that matters. And either a given poem or story is great or good or else it's not as good as one would wish.
It's easier in some ways to talk around writing than to make a judgment about writing. But time is a great judge. Slow, but great.
Left you some thoughts there...
ReplyDeleteInteresting conversation for me to eavesdrop! I guess if I changed "writer" to "artist", I might have similar thoughts. Always a difficult question to answer as you say, Marly. I know I'm not a good writer, so I don't write poetry or novels; blog posts are enough of a challenge. :-)
ReplyDeleteI often like what people say about another mode of art better than what they say about my own--often the translation from one medium to another (as from painting to seeing how it applies to writing) seems illuminating. And that works for me best with comments on visual arts.
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