Stunning. The Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading in Rio de Janeiro. #libraries

Marie Howe, summing up my life…

More Like stroke Of lightning In the night Some mark To make Some word To tell. -Langston Hughes

Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. – E. L. Doctorow photo: Fred Lyon

I’m reminded of Stephen King’s Prime Rule of Writing: “Read a lot and write a lot.” Here’s more— Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. [This book] is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be…

Good art is a truing of vision, in the way a saw is trued in the saw shop, to cut more cleanly. It is also a changing of vision. Entering a good poem, a person feels, tastes, hears, thinks, and sees in altered ways. Why ask art into a life at all, if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means? Some hunger for more is in us—more range, more depth, more feeling; more associative freedom, more beauty. More perplexity and more friction of interest. More prismatic grief and unstunted delight, more longing, more darkness. More saturation and permeability in knowing our own existence as also…

Same old, same old. Silent house, except for a cat snoring and the sound my laptop makes as I type. Writing poems. Thinking. Editing. Is this one any good? Who is the one to say so? Is all this effort a waste of time? Why have I always felt so impelled to write? Why is this one so crowded and this one so spare? I find a line I like: ‘I am bombarded, yet I stand.’ I proceed from there. Something takes shape, however vaguely.

Billy Collins was U.S. Poet Laureate at the time of 9/11. This is his poem from the Twin Towers event, dedicated to those killed and the survivors. THE NAMES Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night. A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze, And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows, I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened, Then Baxter and Calabro, Davis and Eberling, names falling into place As droplets fell through the dark. Names printed on the ceiling of the night. Names slipping around a watery bend. Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream. In the morning, I…