There is no pencil in the world that doesn’t have the ability to strike out as well as to instigate. It’s best to wirte, to begin with, generously.
If tone is wrong, nothing is right.
Lassitude in the heart puts lassitude on the page.
The sun has a working schedule, and the snow, and the birds, and every green leaf. Perhaps you should have one too.
No matter how cunning the sentence, it is impossible to hide the pique.
Some writing should be set aside and forgotten. Maybe it needed more salt and pepper. Or, maybe, less.
Too many words, even the right words, can kill the poem.
Sometimes you will feel, like nothing else, the sweet, electric drowse of creation.
But sometimes you must bear the failure of labor to its anticipated result.
Plain as a needle a poem may be, or opulent as the shell of the channeled whelk, or the face of the lily, it matters not; it is a ceremony of words, a story, a prayer, an invitation, a flow of words that reaches out and, hopefully, without being real in the way that the least incident is real, is able to stir in the reader a real response.
[Look for Channeled Whelks. Look for one that is on the move. – ID]
Above all, take a chance. Sing, like blood going down the vain.
Long Life (2004), Mary Oliver