Author Archives: weinberg

writing

Had, having, and in quest to have

I have just realized shall be able to refer, obliquely, to last semester as “the semester of the sonnet competition.”

There was, indeed, a sonnet competition, judged this year by A.E. Stallings, and for weeks, our out-of-workshop workshops revolved around sonnets, as many of us attempted to write them. I didn’t try. It is only now, looking back, that I am surprised at myself for not having made the effort.

What better time to write a sonnet, than when all your friends are doing it? Perhaps (I know this is at least partially true) I thought their sonnets were so good I did not need to bother. Perhaps (also partially true) most of the things I have to say tend to be pleasantly unwieldy and exposition-heavy, and unsuitable, I thought, to the form. But why didn’t I try?

I don’t know. I think I half-have in mind a snarky comment made by one poet on another poet’s online post where the snidest thing he could think of to say was “Hey X. Still writing sonnets?”

Why have I still not–I think ever, really–written a sonnet as more than an exercise?

The line length is something I have never liked very much, either. I write lots of poems of these lengths:
12 lines (3×4)
16 lines (4×4 or 2×8)
15 lines (3×5)
18 lines (3×6)
but 14?

Standard
gradschool, workstyle

I had a scare

when I thought, last week, that I had submitted a critical writing sample essay to an online application with an incorrectly formatted Works Cited page. I couldn’t find, anywhere on either laptop, the correctly formatted version. Then I thought of downloading the document from the online application, where, to my great relief, it still lived in its correct form. I was not only able to confirm that I had submitted the right version, but also re-download and save this version for future submissions. This is a case of technology helping.

Standard
books, quotes, writing

somewhat less despondent

“I called the other afternoon, at the laudanum hour, upon Bernard Hudley, the dramatist, and found him, to my astonishment, somewhat less despondent than he had been on my previous visit some months before. ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked anxiously. ‘Can I do anything to depress you?'”

– James Thurber, “Afternoon of a Playwright,” from Credos and Curios, a posthumously published collection of short pieces

Standard
writing

last semester,

we remarked, a number of times, on Wallace Stevens’s habit of composing poems in his head as he walked to work and then dictating them to his secretary. I have been thinking of this lately because of the amount of time I’ve spent on buses and subway cars lately. Every time I have a prolonged stretch of time on public transit, I get more writing done–and more rhythmical, regular writing. It’s not quite composing the whole poem in my head, but frequently large portions of it get done that way. The rhythm of the train car, like the rhythm of the walk, is part of the process.

All of which is to say that this has been a poetically productive vacation.

Standard
Uncategorized

by whatever means necessary

“[Saunders]…In a certain way, if you keep trying to serve the story you would inadvertently or unwittingly push something into a three-act structure.

Guernica: In steering away from your own drift…

George Saunders: I think so. Someone told me once–I mean I said, “Is it ok that I don’t really know what the three-act structure is?” And he said, “It’s basically: Act 1–a guy climbs up a tree; Act 2–people come and throw stuff at him; Act 3–he gets down.”

Guernica: [laughs]

George Saunders: It’s like that with any story. If I say, “Oh, I got so wasted last night, and I drove my car into the Mississippi and then a fish came up and bit me on the ass and luckily I was able to swim to shore,” that’s a three-act structure. I spent a lot of time when I was in my twenties really torturing myself about things like scene and plot and character and stucture–is this a story? is this a novella? So, you know, and then I realized, “Actually, dumbass, all I have to do is keep the reader’s attention for twenty pages, by whatever means necessary.”

-George Saunders, interviewed in Guernica. He has a great short story in the New Yorker now. Via T.B.

Standard
books, quotes

this must be distinctly understood

“There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot–say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance–literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.”
– A Christmas Carol, OUP:1989, 7

Standard