The Write Advice 206: e.e. cummings

 

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.

      This may sound easy. It isn’t.

      A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling.  And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.

      Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why?  Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.

      To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

      As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn’t a poet can possibly imagine.  Why?  Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else.  We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time — and whenever we do it, we’re not poets.

      If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you’ve written one line of one poem, you’ll be very lucky indeed.

      And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world — unless you’re not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

      Does that sound dismal? It isn’t.

      It’s the most wonderful life on earth.

      Or so I feel.

 

A Poet's Advice to Students (1953)

 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read about the life and sample the work of North American poet e.e. cummings:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/e-e-cummings

 

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 095: NADIA BEN SLIMA

 

 

NADIA BEN SLIMA

 c 2017

 

 

 

 

 

UNFATHOMABLE

 

When will you understand?

you are not what you fear

and fears do not appear

that make souls mute

troubles that you repaint 

of a naïve anguish

are not worth the intention

promised by your virtue 

 

The flowers suddenly have

the scent of your fear

and when you remember yourself

sorrow awakens

You make of it a home

ramparts of nothingness

When will you understand?

you are very much what pleases you

 

 

2016

Translated [very loosely] by

BR

 

 

see below for original French text

 

Born in 1980 in the Moselle region of France, Nadia Ben Slima spent her childhood and most of her adult life in Lorraine, Alsace and Franche-Comté in the east of the country.  She now lives in the northern city of Lille.  Drawn as much to science as she is to literature, Ben Slima has recently focused her energies on pursuing a scientific career, putting her passion for poetry on hold for the time being.

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read more poems (only in French) by NADIA BEN SLIMA:

 

 

 

https://www.poetica.fr/categories/nadia-ben-slima/

 

 

 

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ABYSSAL

 

 

Quand comprendas-tu?

tu n'es pas ce que tu crains

et les peurs ne revêtent

que les âmes muette

les peines que tu repeins

d'une angoisse ingénue

ne valent pas le dessein

promis par ta vertu

 

 

Les fleurs ont soudain

le parfum de ta peur

et quand tu te souviens

s'agite le chagrin 

tu en fais ta demeure

des remparts de riens

Quand comprendras-tu?

tu es bien ce qui te plaît

2016

 

 

The Write Advice 205: DUNA GHALI

 

The author’s name still makes a difference in the reception of the text.  I still believe that a woman’s name influences the reading of both male and female readers.  I believe the gender of the writer colors the reading of the text in certain ways.  But when writers are in the midst of the act of writing, they are focused on the text itself.  The writer herself (or himself) is already in a transformational moment where one is not woman or man.  Virginia Woolf spoke about the angel in the house, who stood behind her to warn her when she wrote, so she had to consider what should be said and what should not be said as a woman.  After some time being tormented by this angel, she threw the inkwell at her and killed her.  To me, it’s about the uniqueness of individuals and texts. The prevailing judgment still revolves around men addressing major issues, while women write about 'daily life'… but it must be acknowledged that much has changed today, and what remains are the sensitivities of reading.

 

Duna Ghali on Writing, Translating, and Publishing Between Arabic and Danish [ArabLit, 2 May 2024]

 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read the full interview with Iraqi writer DUNA GHALI:

 

 

https://arablit.org/2024/05/02/duna-ghali-on-writing-translation-and-publishing-between-arabic-and-danish/

 

 

 

 

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Think About It 101: GORDON LIVINGSTON

 

The tendency to hyperbole is everywhere around us, so that people who can barely carry a tune are introduced as 'artists,' while those lacking all writing skills are referred to as 'authors,' and politicians without intelligence or moral standing are our 'leaders.'  This degrading tendency, fostered by a culture of celebrity, not only leads to cynicism and a debasement of taste, it distorts our appreciation of persons of genuine accomplishment.  If our heroes shrink, so does our sense of what it is to dare greatly, to truly achieve something.

 

 

And Never Stop Dancing: Thirty More True Things You Need To Know Now (2006)

 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read the obituary of North American psychiatrist, author and anti-war protester DR GORDON STUART LIVINGSTON (1939–2016):

 

 

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/obituaries/bs-md-ob-gordon-livingston-20160323-story.html 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 204: BRIAN MOORE

 

If you are like me, when you are writing novels, you get up every morning, come out here and say 'Why am I not doing something useful, like my brothers, like being a doctor and helping people in this world. I’m sitting here, a middle-aged man writing fantasies, spinning out stories which, in essence, may be read and enjoyed by some people for all the wrong reasons.'

      You have no knowledge whether your books will be read when you are dead or even if they will be read ten years from now or whether they will be remembered two years from now. So that anyone who writes novels without having financial profit as his goal, who writes novels simply in the hope that he is going to create something that will last, is bound to be filled with self-doubt, and he is bound to be a person who becomes reclusive or gloomy at times.

 

 

Previously unpublished interview 1973 [The Irish Times, 5 January 2019]

 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read the full interview with Irish/Canadian novelist BRIAN MOORE:

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/brian-moore-my-real-strength-is-that-i-am-a-truthful-writer-1.3726350

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 094: LES MURRAY

 

LES MURRAY, c 2001

 

 

 

THE PAST EVER PRESENT

 

 

Love is always an awarded thing

but some are no winners, of no awarding class.

Each is a song that they themselves can't sing.

 

For months of sundays, singlehanded under iron, with the flies,

they used to be safe from that dizzying small-town sex

whose ridicule brought a shamed evasion to their eyes. 

Disdaining the relegated as themselves, they eyed the vividest

for whom inept gentleness without prestige was slow.

Pity even the best, then, when they're made second best.

 

Consider the self-sentenced who heel the earth round with shy feet

and the wallflower who weeps not from her eyes but her palms

and those who don't master the patter, or whom the codes defeat.

 

If love is always an awarded thing

some have cursed the judging and screamed off down old roads

and all that they killed were the song they couldn't sing.

 

 

 

from

Fox Dog Field 

(1990) 

A sometimes controversial figure in Australian literature for his anti-academic, anti-liberal, anti-modernist, anti-abstruse attitude to poetry, Les Murray rose from humble beginnings — he was born in the tiny New South Wales town of Nabiac on 17 October 1938 and spent his formative years in the nearby town of Bunyah, to which he permanently returned in 1985 after travelling extensively in Europe and the UK — to become one of the country's leading literary exports and its most internationally lauded and widely read poet. 

 

Murray grew up on his father's dairy farm where he developed his lifelong love of nature.  His world changed drastically, however, when his mother died of a miscarriage when he was twelve — an event that sent his father spiralling into severe grief-fuelled depression, an affliction that Murray himself would fall victim to in later life despite his natural ebullience and the Roman Catholic faith he adopted after marrying fellow student Valerie Morelli in 1962.  (They would remain married until his death and produce five children together.)

 

After graduating from the University of Sydney with a degree in Modern Languages Murray worked for several years as a translator at the Australian National University in Canberra.  Having decided at the age of eighteen that he wanted to be a poet, he published his first poem in the nationally distributed magazine The Bulletin in 1961.  Ten years later, having published the collections The Ilex Tree (1965) and The Weatherboard Cathedral (1969) in the meantime, he left his job to devote himself to poetry full-time, publishing more than forty collections along with many works of criticism plus two verse novels and a short but telling memoir of his struggle with depression titled Killing the Black Dog (2011) between 1972 and his death in 2019.

 

Murray also won several prestigious literary awards, including the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry (in 1984 and 1993), the Griffin Poetry Prize (in 2001 and 2002), the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry (he was also awarded the Order of Australia despite being an avowed republican) and the TS Eliot Prize (despite his negative response to Eliot's work) for his 1996 collection Subhuman Redneck Poems. 

 

 

Use the link below to read the obituary of Australian poet, editor and critic LES MURRAY (1938-2019):

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/01/les-murray-obituary

 

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The Write Advice 203: HAFSA ZAYYAN

 

I was quite disciplined about researching; I felt the responsibility to get it as right as possible, because even though it’s fiction, I wanted the historical elements of it to be as accurate as possible. It’s also an educational tool, that’s another purpose of the novel, to teach people about this part of our history. So if I had a creative block I could still do stuff to progress the novel that wasn’t writing.

 

Interview [Penguin Books UK, 22 January 2021]

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read the full online interview with British novelist HAFSA ZAYYAN:

 

 

https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2021/01/hafsa-zayyan-all-birds-uganda-novel-writing-debut-advice

 

 

 

 

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