It
begins with an image and then a question, perhaps another image, another
question, and then a place comes into focus, and a situation.
—Michael
Ondaatje
You do not need experience of a thing in
order to write about it. You do not need to have lived it, only to have IMAGINED it. You use your experience of life
to render other experience. By the time you are seven or eight, probably before
then, you have experienced the whole range of human emotion: a child crying
over a lost doll is grieving. That is grief, with all its attendant physical
and psychological attributes. And so you know you can trust your instincts
about it. And therefore you never hesitate to make it up, CREATE it, let it
take you where it will. You learn to be audacious without thinking of it as
such--it is simply following your interest in the people you've brought into
being, and trying to deliver clearly, in concrete terms, involving all the
senses, what they go through, what their suffering is and what it means to them
in context. And you leave the rest to the reader.
—Richard
Bausch
“Poets write of war in
ways that become difficult to change even when they are writing of other
subjects. Writers who once wore uniforms
regard humanity under a challenging light—that of gunfire. Writers who made their way through the dense jungle
of war now also journey through the dense jungle of the past.”
Nguyen Khoa Diem, at
one of our meetings in Vietnam
“What can poems do? Poetry has the power of reconciliation. It also has the power to save the
world.” —Nguyen Duy
"Imaginary
evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.
Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous,
intoxicating" (p.62).
"Joy is the overflowing consciousness of reality" (p.73).
"Joy is the overflowing consciousness of reality" (p.73).
Simone
Weil
Dear associates, we'll meet today in our beautiful room at 10:30 a.m. Bring laptops and/or pencil and paper.
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