Tag: t s eliot

Once I lost my daily habit, it turned into a less than weekly habit as I didn’t write another entry for almost two weeks. This time, I wrote down a collection of story ideas (story ideas are cheap—my punk-ass self was crapping these out like a gringo tourist in rural Mexico). Story ideas:“Rite of Passage” […]

The pacing of the residency is such that it kind of feels like it’s all coasting from here on. The morning seminar was “Anthology” with Denis Johnson in which we contributed poems that made us want to be a writer. I, being a fiction person, lied and chose “These Poems, She Said” by Robert Bringhurst. […]

As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry & The Use of Criticism.

But what we experience as readers is never exactly what the poet experienced, nor would there be any point in its being, though certainly it has some relation to the poet’s experience. What the poet experienced is not poetry but poetic material; the writing of the poetry is a fresh “experience” for him, and the […]

If people only wrote when they had something to say, and never merely because they wanted to write a book, or because they occupied a position such that the writing of books was expected of them, the mass of criticism would not be wholly out of proportion to the small number of critical books worth […]

While reading T. S. Eliot’s The Use of Poetry & The Use of Criticism, I came across an interesting observation: For the simplest auditors there is the plot, for the more thoughtful the character and conflict of character, for the more literary the words and phrasing, for the more musically sensitive the rhythm, and for […]