Waiting for him

Every day, these little gals ornament the hall rug while S takes a shower. You can see the lumps on Pookie from her autoimmune condition: sterile nodular panniculitis. You can also tell the girls are mature dachshunds by their gray muzzles. We're gray, too, so it doesn't matter that much. This picture has absolutely nothing to do with poetry (maybe just a little?) but tonight, class, we might talk some about form.

Today, I was able to settle in with the new Paris Review. I love the Interviews and am thrilled that they are ALL available FREE to read online, even the one in the current issue. I know I have mentioned this before but this is SUCH a great resource! I am reading them also on my iPhone. Since they started in 1956, they should last me a long time, even if I don't reread the ones I read 30 years ago.

There are two Interviews in the current issue. And here's a girl in Dutch costume (from an old photo) with a great expression on the cover, and more Dutch photos inside.

Emmanuel Carrere is a French writer, probably better known in Europe. He has some very interesting things to say about writing in general and his writing in particular.

Ursula LeGuin is a fine writer with a special appeal to many of my friends. She is known and praised for fiction for both children and adults. She is also a poet. Over a lifetime of writing, she has produced many fine works of many different kinds.

This was what she had to say in response to a question about what the appeal was for a writer to write in a genre:

"It's like working in any form---in poetry, for example. When you work in form, be it a sonnet or villanelle or whatever, the form is there and you have to fill it. And you have to find how to make that form say what you want to say. But what you find, always---I think any poet who has worked in form will agree with me---is that the form leads you to what you want to say. It is wonderful and mysterious. I think something similar happens in fiction. A genre is a form, in a sense, and that can lead you to ideas that you would not have just thought up if you were working in an undefined field. It must have something to do with the way our minds are constructed."

Ursula LeGuin, interviewed by John Wray 
in Paris Review 206, page 73.