Write The Book: Conversations on Craft
Arts:Books
American academic and political advisor, Stanley "Huck" Gutman, who writes a newsletter about poetry which is distributed by email and through the UVM listserv, "Poetry."
See below for links to pages featuring some of the works that Huck and I discuss during the interview.
This week's Write the Book Prompt was generously suggested by my guest, Huck Gutman, who writes:
The surprising subject of many, many poems of the past two hundred years has been the need to pay attention to what is right in front of us, of what is so ‘ordinary’ that we look at it, through it, but don’t see it. In some sense, our lived reality is invisible to us; in our habitual movement through our lives, we don’t pay attention to what is actually there in front of us and around us.
So as a writing prompt, I would suggest writing about something right in front of you that you don’t normally ‘see.’ For many, this is an object; for some, like Wordsworth, it is a person who seems ordinary but who has that amazing spark that is the emblem of life.
Among the life of ordinary things is where our existence takes place. A poem can recognize that in the ‘ordinary’ are the things that make our world our world. Write about such a thing. (If you want to see what this looks like, lots of William Carlos Williams poems do this; so do a lot of poems by Elizabeth Bishop; so do the remarkable ‘Odes’ to common things that Pablo Neruda wrote in the later years of his life…) (For ‘ordinary’ people, there is Wordsworth; there is always that superlative writer – though not a poet – Anton Chekov. )
Good luck with your work in the coming week, and please tune in next week for another prompt or suggestion.
Music Credit: Aaron Shapiro
Works Discussed:
Paul Celan, "Once"
T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"
Zbigniew Herbert, "Five Men"
Tim O'Brien, "The Things They Carried"
Stevie Smith, "Not Waving But Drowning"
Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning"
Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself 47 "
C.K. Williams, "Jew On Bridge"
William Carlos Williams:
"Calypso II"
"This is Just to Say"
"Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"
William Wordsworth, Extracts from the Prelude: [Ascent of Snowdon]
Paul Zimmer, "A Romance for the Wild Turkey"
Stephen Elliott - Archive Interview (4/12/21)
Neil Shepard - Archive Interview (4/5/21)
Angela Patten - Archive Interview (3/29/21)
Blending the Tangible and the Ineffable in Fiction: Steven Wingate and Maxim Loskutoff (3/22/21)
Matthew Salesses (3/15/21)
Jakob Guanzon (3/8/21)
Andrea Williams - 3/1/21
From the Archives: Howard Norman (2/22/21)
On Writing for a YA Audience: Sharon G. Flake and Bill Konigsberg (2/15/21)
Claudio Lomnitz (2/8/21)
Setting: A Conversation with Susan Conley and Lauren Fox (2/1/21)
From the Archives: Kathryn Davis (1/25/21)
Ryan Scagnelli (1/18/21)
Plotting the Literary Novel: A Conversation with Margot Livesey and Jill McCorkle (1/11/21)
Ally Condie (1/4/21)
David Jauss - Archive Interview (12/28/20)
A Message from Shelagh: Happy Holidays!
Dawna Pederzani (12/14/20)
Martin Puchner (12/7/20)
Matt Fried - Archive Episode (11/30/20)
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Lit Society: Books and Drama
Ex Libris
Fresh Air
Just So Stories
Anne of Avonlea
Myths and Legends
Catholic Bible Study