The near interview of Richard Z
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- Inga54
- stoneking31
- danceswithwinos
- poeticinspre
- Swishonvey
- danceswithwinos
- stoneking31
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» Inga54 - Waiting for poems to come
Richard Zola talks about tuning in and sitting and waiting for poems to come and I have just read an (sorry, haven't got the date, but it was a Saturday recently) article by Seamus Heaney in the Guardian where he describes the writing process like this:"...Well, in the writing of any poem there's usually a line being cast from the circumference of your whole understanding towards intuitions and images down there in the memory pool.If you're lucky, you feel life moving at the other end of the line; the remembered thing starts off a chain reaction of words and associations, and at that point what you need is the whole of your acquired knowledge and understanding, your cultural memory and literary awareness. You need them to come to your aid and throw a shape that will match and make sense of your excitement...."
The last bit interests me. How rigorous has your training got to be? Does it mean you can't really expect to write well until you are quite old and have had a lot of life experience?
-- posted by Inga54
» stoneking31 - Re: Life never waits
In response to message posted by Inga54:We often talk about memory like it is on the same level with a ham sandwich or a carton of eggs, or something concrete. My question is: what the hell is memory anyway? Certainly, there is a whole lot of experience that we don't literally remember but which is lodged in the unconscious and which might be accessible to us under certain circumstances. The job of the writer/poet is to put him/herself in the way of these unconscious forces, images, feelings, etc.... or maybe, to be more exact, to take oneself out of the way of those conscious expectations and conditioning that makes perception routine, i.e.: mediocre and cliched. Certainly one has to draw upon one's experiences, but experience is not just what HAPPENS to someone - (as Huxley once said) - it is what a person DOES with what happens to him. I believe that all art is a search for truth and that the truth is a very subjective thing; though when well told, through character, event and images, it resonates with a truth that is super-personal. Can a young person write poetry as intense and revealing and true as an older person? I doubt age really has anything to do with it. A "brain-washed person" of any age is, in a sense, beyond the grasp of poetry. Who was it that said, "the unexamined life is not worth living"? One might better say the unlived life is not worth examining. How one lives, or how long one has lived, is not so important as WHAT ones lives and WHY one lives it. Insights into these questions, stimulated by one's own imagination and an authentic search for "the true", as stated in highly charged (i.e.: meaningful) language is the stuff of poetry, not how old one is.
-- posted by stoneking31
» danceswithwinos - Re: Waiting for poems to come
inga...heaney uses a fishing analogy and appears to suggest that to write poetry you have to be old...old men by a river bank spitting tobacco juice and understanding worms...he also refers to the memory pool..a static almost stagnant thing where 'life'... here you can imagine a grotesque creature dripping slime and farting putrescence...responding to some awful pale half dead bait...alternatively ...his analogy evokes pictures of an eden dawn when all thing were new...and he casts his line into glittering subterranean streams...hooking brilliant rainbows of words which are given life by his experience of EXISTING...and i think this is the important point...existence and particular perception...a developed skill with words...young or old can develop these... for heaney though in some of his work he needs his age...and experience and memory..and the other things he mentions...i think he is talking about how he writes now...in these days...its what his experience has taught him amd he fishes now like that...a handle worn smooth ...-- posted by danceswithwinos
» poeticinspre - Re: Re: Waiting for poems to come
In response to message posted by danceswithwinos:I can't express this as eloquently as Billy and Richard, but no, I don't think age is a factor. The only way age affects us is that we have different experiences to draw upon at different times of our lives...different, not better. Not worse. I find that my best poems come when I drift. It's hard to explain. I know there's something I'm feeling, want to say it in a poem. If I don't focus directly on it, but around the edge of it, it comes. For example, one night, in the middle of the night, the words, Sha Boom came into my head (don't ask :-). I knew it was the name of my next poem. I wrote it down. The next night, throughout the night, fragmented images and phrases came through. Wrote those down. The next day, I looked at what I had, put it together, honed it a bit more, cut some here and there, and had my poem. To this day,I don't know 'who' wrote it.
It may not be one of my best poems in the literary sense, but it is a poem that is quite often commented on by readers of my site. They identify, they tell me.
Pris
-- posted by poeticinspre
» Swishonvey - Let Zola Speak
What moves through Richard Zola is geniune. The ideas that encircle his manifestations possess the Shakesperian-Shaman pyramids. We can hardly say more. There is no more room. Let Zola speak, let the rest listen: both will benefit. Amen.-- posted by Swishonvey
» danceswithwinos - Re: Let Zola Speak
..letting zola speak may NOT benefit everyone...i've been asked by an irate pedant nameless out of charity... to correct a statement i made in the interview...guernsey never has been and never will be 11 miles long...its about 6...and covers an area approximately that of washington dc...apparently i should have known that...it SEEMS like 11 miles tho..when youre walking and people calling out geographical information...-- posted by danceswithwinos
» stoneking31 - Long Live Zola
Richard died today (Saturday 22) at around 11:35am inthe Pasque Hospice in Luton UK. He collapsed on his
way to work on 28 July 2005, and was two months later
diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas which was far
advanced.
All the hospice nursing staff were fantastic. We
were looked after extremely well. I was with him all
the way through to the end. We had a room with a
French window and the two hospice cats came to visit
us every day.
Elisabeth
(Richard's wife)
-- posted by stoneking31
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