Patrons & Saints

To one of my saints, my dear friend, Emily Baum, with the deepest appreciation.

In This Essay

On the Shortness of Life by Seneca (C.D.N. Costa, trans.)

Late Bloomers by Malcolm Gladwell, The Annals of Culture, The New Yorker

On Dying Young by Matthew Koslowski, Literature&Literacy

William Stafford, Poet, Wikipedia

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (Stephen Mitchell, trans.)

Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose by Rainer Maria Rilke (Stephen Mitchell, ed. and trans.)

The Second Four Books of Poems by W.S. Merwin

“Is there anything I can do to cheer you up?” she asks.

“Sure,” I say. “Just show me a writer — a poet, preferably — who did not a pickup a pen before he was 27 or 30, who amounted to anything, who history remembers.”

These conversations are common.

I expect the normal, well-intentioned platitudes. Often I begin to despair because I have not dedicated myself to my writing. I begin to think that my time is up. “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it,” Seneca whispers. “Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested.” And I begin to think about how I have not invested my time well.

Rilke writes, “…if, as I have said, one feels one could live without writing, then one shouldn’t write at all.” Haven’t I been living without writing? I have not worked on my novel in weeks. Or have I been existing and drifting? Do I really feel that I could live without writing?

“William Stafford,” she says.

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On Dying Young

As I have written before, I aspire to be a novelist.

But that desire to be a novelist does not come without a number of uncertainties and fears. Looking at the papers, it is not difficult to come across an article bemoaning the state of the publishing business or another article bemoaning the state of the American reader. Stories circulate within writers communities about the difficulties of finding first an agent and then a publisher. The story is so well known that it even appeared in the movie Sideways as the special lot of writers.

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Weekly Review: September 25th to October 1st

Today I’m launching a weekly link review, in which I’ll publish newspaper, magazine, and radio stories related to literature, education, psychology and neuroscience. Bear with me as I get the style down and while work out a few bugs, like how to link items in the table of contents to the full page so that you can jump right to any title that catches your fancy.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Barring Books in Harvard
• Bright Star, Movie Review and Trailer
• Becoming Teachers
• The Craft of Writing and Inspiration of Mentors
• Metaphors and the Way We Think
• Does Education Protect Someone from Dementia and Alzheimer’s?
• Taking Things Serially

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The Prestige in Poetry

Around the time I decided to launch Literature&Literacy on matthewkoslowski.com, my friend Simon Brown was promoting his blog Written Word as a venue for publishing and discussing his poems. Because of the conversations about poetry we had had when we both attended Ohio Wesleyan University–or, at least, so I like to think–he asked me to read his work.

One of his poems in particular, “Reflections” caught my attention. The imagery was stirring, the voice intriguing. But I did not understand the poem.  I saw a collage of images without a narrative instead of a cohesive whole.

I discussed the parts of it that I did not understand. He explained what the narrative was supposed to be: I reread the poem and, knowing the narrative, the poem opened up and became intelligible. But the narrative he provided was not present in the poem.

I began to think of how a poem functions, how understanding and surprise are built into a poem.

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