[Poems] teach not how to live, but how to learn about living. Great poems are all fables about life. … literature gets to be about life genuinely by taking very great regard of how much it is about itself. Its business is, in Stevens’s phrase, ‘plainly to propound’ fictions, the way one propounds parables, and to go on interpreting. That is its higher moralism.
John Hollander
(Source: theparisreview.org)
1
I don’t take laudanum. I take pains. Actually, what summons up vision and voice from wherever they ordinarily hide is the dangerous charm, the potent magic of language itself. Language and its structures—the alchemy of syntax, the temples and sacred precincts of verse. Solving puzzles of construction that I’ve propounded for myself. Discovering secret doorways and hidden surprising staircases in formal rooms that had been lived in for centuries. Those are what lead to unfoldings for me. I guess that’s the poetic dope I—er—do.
John Hollander in an interview by J.D. McClatchy for The Paris Review
(Source: theparisreview.org)
When I was young I had a modest ambition. I wanted to give birth to the world. Mine. I think all artists, even the great ones, are combinations of arrogance and innocence. As life goes on we may lose one or the other in some proportion. To function best one must have both. Once I began to write, though, I learned that the ambition can only phrase itself in the book. There’s such an enormous difference in the writer being, and the writer doing.
Hortense Calisher
(Source: theparisreview.org)
3
a big novel can ramble structurally, and maybe should. It’s the run-of-the-mill jobs where you always know where you’re going. A big novel has a deeper directional sense.
Hortense Calisher
(Source: theparisreview.org)
I want to do unto others as I would wish to be done unto me—to review a book in the light of the author’s total work to date, and that’s more time than I usually spare, though I’ve done it when interested. … And I don’t want the critic head taking over, as it quickly can. But it can be instructive. I discover what I think about literature. And critique by other writers is the best literary talk.
Hortense Calisher
(Source: theparisreview.org)
It took me a long time to feel that I could go to all the wars of life and mind. I confess I am more interested in wars of the mind.
Hortense Calisher
[In writing] I do take flights. It seems to me that everybody’s psyche does that, or craves to. Art only follows suit. Or satisfies that craving. But if you ask about technique—one merely gets to know one’s own habits. … a kind of felt rhythm.
Hortense Calisher
(Source: theparisreview.org)
That’s the wonder of the English language. That its words can alternate between rough and soft, harsh and sweet. And, best of all maybe, short and long. Saxon and Latin. Beowulf and Spenser. Where else does Shakespeare come from? But when people talk about prose being poetic, they mean something soft or fancy—even if they mean to praise. Prose can have its own strong, profound rhythms. And its own lyric. Both as powerful as poetry.
Hortense Calisher
(Source: theparisreview.org)
I always half want to wander that way. [Living under bridges, and so forth.] Independently. Doubt I’ll make it. But I know by now that I don’t care to be an accepted habitué of any one world. That’s part of being a writer too. Wanting out. From the role-playing. Except on the page.
Hortense Calisher
(Source: theparisreview.org)
When you have Shakespeare, Dickens, Ecclesiastes on the shelf, and in your head, where do you start? We owned some trash, but not enough. Or it didn’t take. And in college, where the gods rained down glories in every class, it was even worse. …
I don’t think artists can compete—except as to money and prizes, and, of course, status. Which may be temporary. But not on the page. Or the canvas or the stone. Or the musical score. All you can hope to be is worthy of the company you respect. But at seventeen, when you’re reading the Russians, that’s a tall order. What I did sense was that there were all those riches of expression out there, and I had a chance of joining up. But I felt my lacks too keenly to start in. Yet one can change one’s mind about why that was—and I have. I used to think I lacked confidence. Now I think I knew I had nothing much yet to write about. Or not perspective enough on what was there.
Hortense Calisher
(Source: theparisreview.org)
