Category Archives: Books

“A man innocently dabbles in words and rhymes, and finds that it is his life.” — Patrick Kavanagh

Patrick Kavanagh, titanically angry Irish poet, was born on this day in 1904. He came of age during the Celtic Renaissance and he thought it was all a bunch of bullshit. That is not a direct quote. He was much … Continue reading

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“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” — Oscar Wilde

It’s his birthday today. One of my heroes. His mother, Jane Speranza Francesca Wilde (aka Lady Wilde, aka “Speranza”) was an incredible woman – also in the canon of Irish literary history certainly, not to mention its politics and social … Continue reading

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“You cannot write and answer the phone.” — Paul Durcan

God, I love this guy (born on this day) Durcan’s poems are chatty, observant, scathing, often very funny. His poems sometimes have long funny titles: “The Divorce Referendum, Ireland, 1986”, or “Irish Hierarchy Bans Colour Photography”. He has a strong … Continue reading

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“Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination…think twice before you think.” — E.E. Cummings

It’s his birthday today. I responded to E.E. Cummings in a visceral way when I first had to read his stuff in high school. I didn’t know what it was all about, but I loved the syntax, the unmistakable look … Continue reading

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“Where am I coming from? Where am I going? A fusillade of question marks.” — Ciarán Carson

It’s Ciarán Carson’s birthday today. He died in 2019. Paul Muldoon’s name invariably comes up when Carson is mentioned (post about Muldoon here). They share similarities (Northern Irish settings/concerns, long chatty lines, postmodern accumulation of detail, the use of humor, … Continue reading

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“I don’t care what anybody says about me as long as it isn’t true.” — Truman Capote

It’s his birthday today. In Cold Blood put him on the map for all time. His journalism/literature hybrid told the terrifying story of a random murder in Holcomb, Kansas, where an entire family was annihilated in their own home, for … Continue reading

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“Sunlight on a broken column.” — T.S. Eliot

It’s T.S. Eliot’s birthday. Poets like William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane both said that they needed to forcibly divorce themselves from Eliot’s influence in order to be able to write. His language and influence had that strong a pull. … Continue reading

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“Paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.” — William Faulkner on his writing requirements

“The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. … Continue reading

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“Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

So you see that old libel that we were cynics and skeptics was nonsense from the beginning. On the contrary we were the great believers. — F. Scott Fitzgerald, “My Generation” It’s his birthday today. First off, here’s a piece … Continue reading

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“I couldn’t accept the possibility that the life of the woman would not, or could not, be named in the poetry of my own nation.” — Eavan Boland

“I began to know that I had to bring the poem I’d learned to write near to the life I was starting to live. And that if anything had to yield in that process, it was the poem not the … Continue reading

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