Writing is not only useless, it's spoiled paper.” -Padget Powell “Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials.” -Paul Rudnick.“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” -Thomas Mann.“Let's face it, writing is hell.” -William Styron.You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” -E.L. “Writing is like driving at night in the fog.“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” -E.L.“In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.” -Denise Levertov.“Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up.” -John Edgar Wideman.“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” -F.“Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig” -Stephen Greenblatt.Writing is my way of making other chances.” -Anne Tyler I've never quite believed that one chance is all I get. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough” -Joy Williams “Writers end up writing stories-or rather, stories' shadows-and they're grateful if they can, but it is not enough.Notes on rhyme from Robert Pinsky's own "Translator's Note" in The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation (1995)īe well, do good work, and keep in touch. Whatever moment it was I began to blunder I cannot well say, being so full of sleep I'll tell what I saw, though how I came to enter ![]() The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.Īnd yet, to treat the good I found there as well To tellĪbout those woods is hard - so tangle and roughĪnd savage that thinking of it now, I feel "Midway on our life's journey, I found myself Robert Pinsky's The Inferno of Dante begins: Yeats, and it's sometimes called "Yeatsian rhyme." In the opening Canto, for example, Pinsky has as rhyming triads in the terza rima the words "tell/feel/well" and "sleep/stop/up" and "night/thought/it." He keeps the consonant sounds at the ends of words the same, even though the vowel sounds may differ greatly. It's an interlocking rhyme with the pattern aba bcb cdc ded, etc., which works well in Italian, Pinsky explains, because Italian is rich in rhyme, but "can put tremendous strain on an English translation." Rather than "squeezing unlikely synonyms to the end of lines, and bending idiom ruthlessly to get there," Pinsky explained that he decided on a more flexible - though still systematic - definition of rhyme. In his translation, Pinsky preserved the terza rima rhyme scheme, which Dante invented. He said that the inspiration to translate Dante's epic work was an accident it started when he was assigned just one Canto as part of a group project. Pinsky also translates poetry, and in 1995 he published a new translation of Dante's Inferno. He's been asked many times how he got started as a poet, and has variously answered: "Imitating Yeats, Allen Ginsberg, Frost, Eliot" "Reading the dictionary and daydreaming about the sounds of words when I was a kid" "Liking entertaining people when playing the saxophone as a teenager." And another time: "Whatever makes a child want to glue macaroni on a paper plate and paint the assemblage and see it on the refrigerator - that has always been strong in me." It's the birthday of poet and essayist Robert Pinsky, ( books by this author) born in Long Branch, New Jersey (1940) who said, "I grew up in a disorderly, unpredictable household, jangling alternations of comedy and history, insanity and idealism, doubt and head injury, music and anger, loss and wit." He's the author of 19 books, including his recent poetry collections Jersey Rain (2000), Samurai Song (2001) and Gulf Music: Poems (2007). "The First Artichoke" by Diane Lockward, from What Feeds Us. We peeled and peeled, a vegetable striptease,ĭown to the small filet of delectable heart. Without him, their blossoms seven inches wideīut first we had that miracle on our table. ![]() Of the artichokes in my father's garden bloomed ![]() The way we would in 1959, the year the flowerbuds Piece by piece, the artichoke came apart, We piled up the inedible parts, skeletons Scraped and sucked the nut-flavored slimy stuff. Had been crowned California's first Artichoke Queen.ĭipped it in melted butter, and with my teeth Who'd loved her mother more than she'd loved Zeus. When I hesitated, my father spoke of beautiful Cynara, This, she said, was food we could eat with our fingers. Mashed breadcrumbs, oregano, parmesan, garlic,Īnd lemon, stuffed the mush between the leaves,īaked, then placed the artichoke on the table. She snipped the bronzy winter-kissed tips My mother prepared the artichoke as if preparingĪ miracle. It was as strange as a bony-plated armadillo. Little Buddha of a vegetable, pinecone gone awry. It was the derelict in my father's garden, Planted the seeds and they grew one magnificentĪrtichoke, late-season, long after the squash,
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