My core sense here is to defeat the old chestnut of “inspiration” — a romantic reliance on the muse, whoever she, he or it is meant to be. I tell my students: poetry is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
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SJ Fowler
When I read a poem I love, I have to translate it, so I can show it to my American poet friends. That’s how it usually starts. Poetry from small languages is very rarely known internationally, and this struck me as an awful injustice
I take great pleasure in misusing terminologies or deploying what might be called counter-terminologies, or ur-terminologies, formulations that have been abandoned, forbidden or that never made it and there’s certainly room for humour here.
Our language is born in communication with other people. With those we love and have confidence in we talk in a more personal way. As our voices get influenced by the person we talk to, we also become more personal. It’s the same with literary influences. Voices that mean a lot to us are stimulating our own. We develop into originals in communication with people who have something important to teach us about ourselves.
I had the good luck to come on the scene in New York in the middle of a youth revolution. I was nineteen, America was nineteen… There was electricity, trains left for heaven every ten minutes. Allen was a big, generous, loving uncle full of wise advice for the foolish young.
A large part of how I see writing and literature comes from art and, mainly, painting, either thematically or aesthetically. So there is a strong relationship. I feel that the arts have a greater impact and influence on me than literature. I
Well, everything affects everything – and, as Scorsese’s taxi driver says, YOU ARE YOUR JOB. I am no exception; I am even able to trace back, why this or that line was written in the way it stands now, what has influenced it: either this sentence from St. Augustin, or an example from a textbook, or an idiom heard on the bus.
I grew up in a poetry culture that was all about classical prosody. I mean, I grew up on it in the States. On Joseph Brodsky island. We had a Pushkin tree, a Mandelstam tree, and a Tsvetaeva bush. To jump from that into American poetry, no meter, no rhyme, just print, print, silence—that’s the real culture shock.
From the remarkable Hungarian poetic tradition, which has continued to produce poets of individuality and conscience for hundreds of years and to this very day, Gerevich has defined himself as a resolute and powerful writer, poet and screenwriter.
Gonca has become one of the most direct, concise and eloquent voices in Turkish poetry and one who has begun to grow a reputation far beyond the borders of her home nation