Writing Poetry Is An Unnatural Act, By Elizabeth Bishop

Writing poetry is an unnatural act,† said Elizabeth Bishop. â€Å"It takes great skill to make it seem natural.† Part of developing that skill is about paying attention -- and I think we’d all agree, paying attention in the age of distraction is hard. There is a myriad of distractions every minute: the latest bombastic tweet by our deranged president; someone posting a beautiful plate of food on Instagram; or the onslaught of Facebook posts showing all your poet-friends and acquaintances meeting-up at AWP. The life of a writer was easier, in some ways, in the age of the typewriter: you sat, nothing but a blank page staring back at you, waiting for your fingers to move. No smartphone at the ready to buzz with the latest text from your wife,†¦show more content†¦And for poets, this means approaching life with eyes wide open, paying attention, and taking notes. â€Å"I have no clear goal in mind for the notes I take,† poet and essayist Alison Hawthorne Deming writes in Writing the Sacred Into the Real. â€Å"Other than to help myself remember the intensities of the day, the mix of sensation and thought as it rises and falls with the swells.† For me, note-taking happens sporadically. Throughout much of my writing life, I’ve worked on poems in my head for a long time before I put anything on paper. As I get older, however, I find taking notes helps – especially if I’m busy with daily life -- work, family, getting the dry cleaning. The â€Å"Notes† app on my iPhone is one repository, notebooks and the occasional scrap of paper are another. As with Deming’s, my note-taking may or may not lead to a poem or an essay or much of anything. Yet, as she imparts, â€Å"taking them forces a kind of attention that makes the experience richer, and attention is central to both artistic and spiritual practice.† Practice. That word speaks to me. Poetry as practice seems right. We are amateurs of a sort at translating the unsayable. To do so requires attention and practice. While we must pay attention to those moments of inspiration, often we’re slogging away at draft upon draft of a poem, trying to find where the poem really wants to go. AndShow MoreRelatedElizabeth Bishop s Life And Life3080 Words   |  13 PagesElizabeth Bishop was born on February 9th, 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. When Bishop was an infant, her father died from kidney disease, which provoked her mother’s mental breakdown and removal to a Canadian asylum. After her mother’s admission, Bishop moved in with her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, which became the setting for some of her future poems. Bishop was then taken back to live in Worcester with her father’s parents so that she could attend school in the United States. Bishop’sRead MoreLogical Reasoning189930 Words   |  760 Pagesdecided no longer to print the book, they returned their publishing rights to the original author, Bradley Dowden. The current version has been significantly revised. If you would like to suggest changes to the text, the author would appreciate your writing to him at dowden@csus.edu. iv Praise Comments on the earlier 1993 edition, published by Wadsworth Publishing Company, which is owned by Cengage Learning: There is a great deal of coherence. The chapters build on one another. The organization