Archibald MacLeish on the fine line between poetry and journalism. “What is uttered from the heart alone, will win the hearts of others to your own.” —Goethe “I was signed up in the Writer’s Workshop at Iowa, so I was a poet and they didn’t let you cross over. If you said you were a poet, then you had to write in those funny lines. You couldn’t switch. But when I started writing nonfiction, memoir, and the kind of prose …
Archibald MacLeish’s great essay on literature vs. transcription. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.—John Updike As with David Shields, when Archibald MacLeish talks about “poetry” he means poetry in the larger sense of writing that is literary art vs. writing considered a mere transcription of events. Good journalism was never that, but exemplary works of reportage have always tended to get lumped by the literati—perhaps more so in MacLeish’s day—with garden-variety news …
How Archibald MacLeish courted Bob Dylan for a musical. Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) won three Pulitzer prizes, two for poetry and one for his play about Job, J.B, which also won a Tony Award. His collected poems won the National Book Award. Like some other famous writers of his generation, MacLeish served as an ambulance driver in World War I but also as an artillery officer. After the war he moved to Paris and knew many artists, including Gertrude Stein, John …
Sharing this small immense world A guest post by Olga Khotiashova Pilgrimage: A Memoir of Poland and Rome; The World Is My Home: A Memoir Reading The World is My Home by James Michener was a rare case when I read a memoir not being acquainted with the other works of a writer. Well, not exactly. I had already read his Pilgrimage: A Memoir of Poland and Rome and was hooked. As I had known a lot about Poland, it …
David Bailey, freelance writer and one of my writing posse members, emailed me this note. Somewhere, probably in storage now, I have both Dr. Samuel Johnson’s and James Boswell’s separate accounts of their travels together through Scotland. And I do mean to read them one day—though maybe my resolution to do so has been somewhat blunted by the book I’m just before recommending to you: William W. Starr’s Whisky, Kilts and the Loch Ness Monster: Traveling through Scotland with Boswell …
I noticed about myself and others years ago that humans tack from mood to mood. This was codified for me recently by a member of my writing posse. “People spend a lot of time trying to fight off bad moods,” John said, or words to that effect. Writers, and perhaps any independent worker, become keenly aware at times of the need to manage themselves—to deal with their fluctuating feelings and inevitable setbacks. Two and a half weeks ago I was …