Phillip Lopate

 
 
“When I look back at those years during which poetry formed such an important part of my identity, I am tempted to rub my eyes, as though recalling a time when I ran off and joined the circus.”
 
– Phillip Lopate, At the End of the Day: Selected Poems
   and an Introductory Essay (Marsh Hawk Press, 2010)
 
 
Read more about Phillip Lopate.
 
Read an interview with Phillip Lopate at Poets & Writers.
 
Read two poems from At the End of the Day: Selected Poems and an Introductory Essay.

Reading: Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs – and a selection of review and interview links

 
 
“The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, ‘Write something you’d never show your mother or father. And you know what they say? I could never do that!’”
   
- Lorrie Moore, Elle interview, September 2009
   
   
“The detachment of the artist is kind of creepy. It’s kind of rude, and yet really it’s where art comes from. It’s not the same as courage. It’s closer to bad manners than to courage. [...] if you’re going to be a writer, you basically have to say, ‘this is just who I am […]‘. There’s a certain indefensibility about it. It’s not about loving your community and taking care of it — you’re not attached to the chamber of commerce. It’s a little unsafe. You have to be willing to have only four friends, not 11.”
    
- Lorrie Moore, Elle interview, September 2009
    
     
Michiko Kakutani’s review of A Gate at the Stairs: ‘First Time for Taxis, Lo Mein and Loss’ in the New York Times, 27 August 2009.
   
Jonathan Letham’s review of A Gate at the Stairs: ‘Eyes Wide Open’ in the New York Times, 27 August 2009.
   
Aja Gabel’s review of A Gate at the Stairs in The Virginia Quarterly Review, 27 August 2009.
   
New York Times excerpt from A Gate at the Stairs, 28 August 2009.
   
Mokoto Rich’s profile of Lorrie Moore: ‘Hate, Love, Chores: Lorrie Moore’s Midwest Chronicle’ in the New York Times, 1 September 2009.
   
Stephanie Zacharek’s review of A Gate at the Stairs: ‘People like Lorrie Moore are the only people here’ at Salon, 1 September 2009.
   
Ron Charles’ review of A Gate at the Stairs: ‘With Novel Twists, Moore Paints Both Darkness and an Age of Enlightenment’ in
The Washington Post, 2 September 2009.
   
Kelsey Keith’s ‘Mini interview with Lorrie Moore, Patron Saint of Our Bookshelf’ at Flavorwire, 2 September 2009.
   
Edan Lepucki’s review of A Gate at the Stairs: ‘It’s Not You, It’s Me: Thoughts on Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs’ at The Millions, 3 September 2009.
   
The transcript of Scott Simon’s radio interview with Lorrie Moore: ‘Lorrie Moore On Writing And A ‘Very Crowded’ Life’ on NPR,
5 September 2009.
   
Glen Weldon’s review of A Gate at the Stairs: ‘Moore’s Hallmark Mix Of Wit, Heartache in ‘Gate” on NPR, 5 September 2009.
   
Geeta Sharma Jensen interviews Lorrie Moore: ‘No longer an exile’ in the Milwaukee Wisconsin Journal Sentinel, 5 September 2009.
   
Anna Mundow interviews Lorrie Moore: ‘Wry, young everywoman in 9/11 era’ in The Boston Globe, 6 September 2009.
   
Tom Alesia interviews Lorrie Moore: ”Gate’ expections’ at Madison.com, 6 September 2006.
   
Tom Nissley’s interview with Lorrie Moore at Omnivoracious,
8 September 2009.
   
Lisa Moore’s review of A Gate at the Stairs in The Globe and Mail,
9 September 2009.
   
Megan O’Grady interviews Lorrie Moore at Vogue Daily’s ‘People Are Talking About’, 10 September 2009.
   
Maureen Corrigan’s review of A Gate at the Stairs: ‘Wonder, Bemusement Reign in Moore’s ‘Gate” at NPR, 11 September 2009.
   
Amy Hanridge reviews A Gate at the Stairs at Bookslut,
September 2009.

Siri Hustvedt

 
“I think we all have ghosts inside us, and it’s better when they speak than when they don’t.”
 
- Siri Hustvedt, The Sorrows of an American (Sceptre, 2009)

Kelly Cherry’s Hazard and Prospect

The Rose
Kelly Cherry
 
                  A botanical lecture
 
 
It’s the cup of blood,
the dark drink lovers sip,
the secret food
  
It’s the pulse and elation
of girls on their birthdays,
it’s good-byes at the railroad station
  
It’s the murmur of rain,
the blink of daylight
in a still garden, the clink
of crystal; later, the train
  
pulling out, the white cloth,
apples, pears, and champagne –
good-bye! good-bye!
We’ll weep petals, and dry
our tears with thorns
  
A steep country springs up beyond
the window, with a sky like a pond,
  
a flood.  It’s a rush
of bright horror, a burning bush,
night’s heart,
the living side of the holy rood
  
It’s the whisper of grace in the martyrs’ wood
  
 
  
from Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems
(Louisiana State University Press, 2007)

Anne Lamott on writing

 
“Day by day, you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects.  If you give freely, there will always be more.”
 
- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

John Updike (1932 – 2009)

“A healthy male adult bore consumes each year one and a half times his own weight in other people’s patience.”

“Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day’s progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.”

“Writers take words seriously – perhaps the last professional class that does – and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.”

“The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.”

“The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one’s obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.”

“I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.”

“From earliest childhood I was charmed by the materials of my craft, by pencils and paper and, later, by the typewriter and the entire apparatus of printing.  To condense from one’s memories and fantasies and small discoveries dark marks on paper which become handsomely reproducible many times over still seems to me, after nearly 30 years concerned with the making of books, a magical act, and a delightful technical process.  To distribute oneself thus, as a kind of confetti shower falling upon the heads and shoulders of mankind out of bookstores and the pages of magazines is surely a great privilege and a defiance of the usual earthbound laws whereby human beings make themselves known to one another.”