Luka's Wonderful Poetry Thread

luka

luka

Well-known member
It's been recorded now. Haven't had a chance to listen myself yet so please let me know how it sounds.

 
version

version

Well-known member
Do you spend time carefully selecting each word, or do you just write something then leave it as is/refine it after the fact?
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
I would have chosen to refine this actually. Not much, but there's a few things where I couldn't find the exact word I wanted so I put a placeholder in. And there's one or two repetitions which were inadvertent and upset me a little bit.
 
version

version

Well-known member
It's something that bothers me when I consider writing, like what barty was saying in the blogs thread about worrying how to write would mean he wouldn't write at all.
 
version

version

Well-known member
I read about Joyce spending days writing a single sentence and think if I didn't do that then I wouldn't be doing it 'properly' or 'seriously' enough, like it has to be hard, intensive work.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
There's two types of writers. People like Joyce and people like me. I prefer my type.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Proust's corrections

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Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
One of the many things I find unfathomable about Joyce is that he was writing Ulysses while he had a job teaching languages to students. And was begging for money off relations, etc.

Eliot worked in a bank, but poems are well short compared to novels.

I don't think writing has to be torture but I think you have to be obsessed to do it really well.
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
Yes and no. I think the actual writing can be easy. for me it is easy. I've never found it a struggle. But the obsession, if you can call it that, the focus, has been with the internal conditions which make writing possible.
 
version

version

Well-known member
Any of those big, encyclopaedic things leaves me scratching my head at how. Joyce in particular though, I dunno how you can focus on the book as a whole, any sort of overarching structure or themes, the plot and so on when you're that locked in to each sentence.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It seems beyond belief, at times. Like he was superhuman.

He didn't have to rely on publishers, of course. He had patrons. Dostoevsky famously wrote very fast because he HAD to - and you can tell reading his books (as much as you can, in translation, anyway) that he wrote them in a sort of white heat.

The polar opposite being Flaubert, who took that "mot just" thing to the utmost extreme.
 
version

version

Well-known member
The patrons thing and everything else aside though. How do you sustain the impulse, not lose the thread over decades of writing the stuff whilst focusing on it to that degree? It's absurd.
 
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