“I don't think there's any law where you have to read a poem and immediately understand it.” Thinking Author:Nick Laird
“That's what Samuel Johnson said: "Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think particularly fine, strike it out."” ThinkingOver YouComposition Author:Nick Laird
“The whole process of having to put the thing into the world seems so antithetical to the act of writing. Poetry is slightly easier, because there's less money and fewer people involved. You just let a book of poems trickle out in the world, and it finds its own people. Novels are much harder, and you don't think you should have to do some of the things you're made to do.” PeopleThinkingWorldWritingBookNovelPoetry IsWriting Poetry Author:Nick Laird
“Nabokov quote: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."” ThinkingWritingChildrenSpeakGenius Author:Nick Laird
“Poetry is a way of being alone without feeling alone. It allows you to experience another mind, I suppose. And it does that more fully than other art forms, I think. It doesn't simply describe an experience, or a feeling, or a moment: it evokes it through, say, rhythm or tone or diction or metaphor. It creates a mood. A poem communicates before it is understood; it's not a fully paraphrasable form, which distinguishes it from other forms of writing.” ThinkingWritingMindArtMomentsFeelingsMetaphorCommunicateMoodRhythmPoetry IsFeeling Alone Author:Nick Laird
“Writing a poem is a more personal experience, I think, than writing prose. And perhaps reading a poem is a more personal experience than reading prose, though that's harder to say.” ThinkingWritingReadingProse Author:Nick Laird
“Writing fiction, for me, is a more indirect form of self-exploration than writing verse. When I'm working on a novel I'm moving characters around and I'm thinking about plot and there's a lot of other things going on at the level of structure and story. With a poem, a single idea or line or emotion can sometimes be enough - there's often a sense, in the best poems, of capturing a single instant. Perhaps poems differ from prose in the degree of solace they can offer - by speaking so personally, so directly, about shared experience. A few lines of poetry can provide comfort.” ThinkingWritingSometimesEnoughCharacterMovingEmotionNovelComfortInstantProseVersesSolaceIndirect Author:Nick Laird
“I think all writing is political. All writing shows a preoccupation with something, whatever that thing might be, and by putting pen to paper you are establishing a hierarchy of some sort - this emotion over that emotion, this memory over that memory, this thought over another. And isn't that process of establishing a hierarchy on the page a kind of political act?” ThinkingWritingKindPoliticalMemoriesEmotionPens Author:Nick Laird
“I think all writing is an attempt to complicate and subvert the dominant narrative. Writing personalizes statistics. It puts a face and a name on a number. I suppose in that sense it's always political.” ThinkingWritingPolitical Author:Nick Laird
“I think all writing is about writing. All writing is a way of going out and exploring the world, of examining the way we live, and therefore any words you put down on the page about life will, at some level, also be words about words. It's still amazing, though, how many poems can be read as being analogous to the act of writing a poem. "Go to hell, go into detail, go for the throat" is certainly about writing, but it's also hopefully about a way of living.” ThinkingWorldWritingHellHopefullyExploring Author:Nick Laird
“I think New York is working its way into my poems. It takes a while for a place to filter its way onto the page, but I've been reading more and more American poetry and I certainly feel it as quite a freeing force. Coming from the formally ordered tradition of poetry in Ireland, I find the expansiveness of American literature freeing in some sense.” ThinkingReadingLiteratureTraditionIrelandAmerican Literature Author:Nick Laird
