Clare Cavanagh at Literary Hub:
“Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words / then labor heavily so that they may seem light,” Wisława Szymborska writes in “Under One Small Star.” Szymborska kept her literary labors strictly offstage. She didn’t lecture on her craft. She didn’t devote essays to the art of writing. “I’ve always had the sneaking suspicion I’m not very good at it,” she confesses in her notably brief Nobel Lecture. The poet’s work, she continues, is “hopelessly unphotogenic”:
Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later, and then another hour passes.
She was speaking from experience. Her favorite writing utensil was the trash can: That’s where ninety percent of her work ended up, one friend remarked.
Lightness doesn’t come easily. That’s the lesson we take from the marvelous title poem of this little volume. The acrobat “works to seize this swaying world” by way of
Arduous ease,
watchful agility,
and calculated inspiration…
Why? Because he’s “missing wings.”
More here.
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