I have always felt more at home with questions than with answers, and I gravitate toward poets who explore rather than explain. Mary Oliver, one of my favorites, writes in this poem, “I believe I will never quite know. Though I play at the edge of knowing, truly I … Read More
Author: Tony Herman
“We rise again in the grass. In flowers. In songs.”
Anthony Doerr believes that literary writers should “strive toward complexity, toward questions, and away from certainty, away from stereotype.” This novel, which is a page-turner, one worth getting up early to read, demonstrates that he follows his own advice. Set in France and Germany during 1934-2014, focusing mostly on … Read More
“Denial was a talent she greatly admired. She could have been Gentile, except, of course, she wasn’t.”
How does a humorist write about death? This is what I wondered when I opened Delia Ephron‘s memoir, which has a piece called “Losing Nora” about her famous sister. She relies a lot on the formula that we see in the quote above: she starts by saying the opposite … Read More
“Skip the beginning. Start in the middle.”
What happens when a novel begins in the middle of the story? There is a certain awkwardness. You can anticipate that there will be a lot of skipping around, which requires concentration. Is it worth it? In the case of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, the answer is yes. … Read More
“O, my luve’s like a red, red rose, that’s newly sprung in June; my luve’s like the melodie, that’s sweetly play’d in tune.”
It’s hard to over-state how highly Robert Burns is revered by people from Scotland. In 2009, this 18th century poet was voted “the greatest Scot” by viewers of a Scottish television station. Every year on January 25th, Scots from around the world meet to recite the poem Tam o’Shanter even … Read More
“A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.”
In the tenth anniversary edition of the memoir The Liar’s Club, Mary Karr writes, “Just as the novel form once took up experiences of urban industrialized society that weren’t being addressed in sermons or epistles or epic poems, so memoir — with its single, intensely personal voice — wrestles … Read More
“Till this moment, I never knew myself.”
When Pride and Prejudice turned 200 years old last year, the Guardian ran a wonderful collection of short pieces about the main characters by a variety of writers, who said the sorts of thing that literary people say when they are out partying: Mr. Bennett is a bully, Elizabeth doesn’t … Read More
“Give the buried flower a dream.”
“Danger” might not be the first word that comes to mind when thinking of Robert Frost. And yet, look at what he says in this article: “If poetry isn’t understanding all, the whole word, then it isn’t worth anything. Young poets forget that poetry must include the mind as … Read More
“Don’t begin with an idea: begin with the point of the pen touching paper.”
Uniquely in America, there is “a desire to understand in the heat of living,” says Natalie Goldberg in her book about the practice of writing memoir. Don’t think of memoirs as records of events. Instead, think of it as a chance to make sense of your life and search for … Read More
“I am a part of all that I have met.”
This passage from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” based on the character in Homer’s Odyssey, continues: “Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades forever and ever when I move. How dull it is to pause.” Indeed! How dull the world would be without fine … Read More
“I felt that this was my last moment to reach out and understand something of the world.”
Peter Taylor, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Penn Faulkner Award, is virtually unknown today. In a 1985 review, the New York Times said: “His narrative method is to hover over the action, to digress from it, to explore byways and relationships, to speculate on alternative possibilities – … Read More
“Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows.”
The passage continues: “That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself.” This book, the autobiography of Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, reminds me of Proust. He describes things in great detail — including his faults and … Read More
“Some part of art is the art of waiting”
The poet Ted Kooser — who won the Pulitzer Prize after he retired — knows something about art and waiting. However, that doesn’t mean he’s a calm poet. His poem “Memory” starts like this: “Spinning up dust and cornhusks as it crossed the chalky, exhausted fields, it sucked up into … Read More
“It was the kind of question that starts a landslide in the mind.”
What was the question? Was it profound? Shocking? Revealing? Turns out, it’s all of these, and it’s laced with British humor. The question was, “Do we need a cup of tea?” This comes next: “She sounded puzzled and distressed and I began to realize that my question had struck at … Read More
“The name of the author is the first to go, followed obediently by the title, the plot…”
The poem “Forgetfulness” by Billy Collins continues: “the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain, to a … Read More