Thieves and pirates often live by some sort of code. Robin Hood, whose identity as a thief is somewhat questionable, had a code: steal from the rich and give to the poor. Pirates also had a sort of code; at least, the pirates in Pirates of the Caribbean had a code even if nobody followed it precisely (I know that puts the code itself in question. Let’s not get into the details of said pirates being fictitious characters.).
writing
Write First. Edit Later.
Numerous years of writing academic papers, essays, poems, blog posts, white papers, et cetera, have taught an important lesson: write first and edit later. The initial words must flow. They cannot and should be stopped. They should not be weeded or burned before they come to fruition. They and their weedy counterparts have to go a little wild at first so that the right and good words can be discerned and put to use.
How to be a Better Editor of Your Own Work
But the greatest trauma, the necessary wounding that any poet must undergo, is the detachment from her own work. The beginning after the beginning. We must cut ourselves out and off to move toward a sophisticated sense of the art beyond our sense of self, to develop a historical sense, to see that we write in dialogue with the poetry of the past, to see poems as things, material to be manipulated. This is the big divide, what must be stressed again and again and not just in undergraduate workshops. We must risk a loss of passionate connection to distance ourselves from our work, to grow a little cold to it in order to revise, in order to look at a poem as a series of decisions. Why this and not that? We must develop an ability to read our work skeptically. – Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction
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Thoughts on Poetry for Poetry at Work Day
…a poem freshens the world. – Ted Kooser
The first story I wrote was about my grandmother who had fallen into a lake. My first poem, fittingly or disturbingly, used the same experience. The incident, something I knew and with which I was familiar, propelled me into the unknown. At first, it was the world of unknown letters and words – I wrote my first story when I was six or seven. The second was an unfamiliar world, but it turned out to be the world I needed.
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Write Right: Commas and Introductory Phrases
I confess I rarely visit the rules about commas and introductory phrases anymore; the rules are somewhat innate. Because of that, my decision to or not to use a comma sometimes seems based on sound and appearance rather than any rules. Rules, however, do exist vague though they may be.
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Good Writing is like a Bowl of Ice Cream
I like ice cream a lot. I take it back. When I say I like ice cream, I mean that I really, really like chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. I like it so much that I haven’t had it in over a year. If I buy it, I want to eat it all the time. It’s best left as a rare treat so that our amiable relationship can continue.