predilection and its limits

When it comes to writing, our predilections will inevitably shape our practice, but they should not constrain our purview when it comes to the experience of literature.

waist deep in the river

Writing is like wading waist deep into a river, noticing the trees on the far bank, the swallows catching light as they dive and turn over the surface, while what you should be writing about is down in the murk, the flow of the slow current, the catfish and carp moving along the bottom.

finding or writing

I saw a workshop advert entitled 'Writing Erasure Poetry'.

drop trap

Books are just cages that get dropped over writing.

fall in

Often when writing longhand the letters stagger into the harsh light of the page.

low pressure system

Sitting down to write with that good feeling of a gathering storm.

break in the action

The longer you’ve written poems, the less you fear those periods when nothing is forthcoming.

off hand

His best ‘writings’ were those things he’d said in conversation and that others had remembered and recorded.

finish it

The poem that wouldn’t give up on me.

off the rails

When a poem is going too fast and is about to come off the rails (the line), let it.

writing jail

Joan Simon: …What’s ahead?

Jenny Holzer: Trying to write something again. I haven’t locked myself up recently. As soon as I finish the next round of public pieces—in Europe and the US—I have to go to writing jail.

Joan Simon: The artists that have fed into your thinking are an extremely diverse lot. Among the earliest is writer, artist and printer William Blake.

Jenny Holzer: When I read Songs of Innocence (1779-c. 1800), for the first time I was entirely convinced that there was good in the world, including people.

Joan Simon: And his illustrations?

Jenny Holzer: I liked the fact that Blake was able to have the text and images inhabit the same space.

Joan Simon: Was there any one poem in particular?

Jenny Holzer: There is a lamb poem with just one little sinister turn that mentions a neck.

Joan Simon: ‘Little Lamb / Here I am, / Come and lick, / My white neck.’

Jenny Holzer: That’s the one. Then from Songs of Experience:

     If thought is life
     And strength and breath
     And the want
     Of thought is death.

“Jenny Holzer and Joan Simon in Conversation, June 1997, New York”
pressPlay: contemporary artists in conversation (Phaidon Press, 2005)

no other words

As soon as a writer types the phrase ‘in other words’, he should immediately delete that phrase and the whole passage it referred to. One doesn’t translate within the language.

dread word

Dread the last word, so much you enjoyed the poem’s writing, or reading.

ordinary and rare words

What matters in writing, I think, is that the ordinary word seems to be used for the first time, and the rare one seems ordinary, so that one doesn't stumble over it and no word feels strange or wrong, wherever it is placed.

—Juan Ramon Jiménez, The Complete Perfectionist: The Poetics of Work, ed. Christopher Maurer (Doubleday, 1997), p. 147