Now that the most interesting matter of identity is not what place someone was born in, but what point in time they are from - where they sit in relation to time. Age has become much more divisive than place. With the Internet and globalization, a twenty-year-old in New York has far more cultural references in common with a twenty-year-old in Nebraska than they do with a thirty-year-old who lives next door. National identity is what they trick you with when they want your feet in their army boots or your taxes in their bailouts.

Nick Laird

Categorized in : Interesting Age Army

There is such a shelter in each other. by Nick Laird

There is such a shelter in each other.

shelter

What passes for love is imperfect knowledge. Not knowing, initially, allows faithlessness to dress up as its opposite; casts the inarticulate as enigmatic, the selfish as forgetful, the angry as impassioned.

selfish opposites love-is

She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate... by Nick Laird

She was privileged enough to feel at home anywhere, and to equate squalor with authenticity.

authenticity enough home

I don't think there's any law where you have to read a poem and i... by Nick Laird

I don't think there's any law where you have to read a poem and immediately understand it.

thinking

The reason that the book exists is because there was a gap in you. You wrote the book to fulfill that gap in some way.

reason book

Most of the poems I write go through forty versions and then stay in a file on my computer. I'm not very good at sending stuff out or feeling that something is ready to send out and I never have been. Part of the problem is that as soon as a poem is finished, it stops being all that interesting to me.

feelings writing interesting

With an age difference comes a great gap in cultural references, and so on. It's not all about race and gender. It interests me that, as you get older, your younger self becomes a stranger to you. A split occurs within yourself. But maybe we're all always strangers to ourselves.

gender stranger age

I'm always reading books, I'm always having encounters, I'm always taking trips. Whatever it is you come up with about how you got started, that's equally true for all the books you didn't start.

reading-books reading book

It seems to me that metaphors come down to a certain idea of interconnectedness - that everything relates to everything else. Metaphors don't believe in autonomy. And in the end, perhaps that idea of interconnectedness is a moral position.

metaphor moral believe

Poetry is a way of being alone without feeling alone. It allows you to experience another mind, I suppose. And it does that more fully than other art forms, I think. It doesn't simply describe an experience, or a feeling, or a moment: it evokes it through, say, rhythm or tone or diction or metaphor. It creates a mood. A poem communicates before it is understood; it's not a fully paraphrasable form, which distinguishes it from other forms of writing.

writing art thinking

Poetry is perhaps the oldest art form. We can go back to an age-old idea of naming things, the Adamic impulse - to give something a name has always been an immensely powerful thing. To name something is to own it, to capture it. A poem is still a kind of spell, an incantation. Historically, a poem also invoked: it was a blessing, or a curse, or a charm. It had a motile power, was able to summon something into being. A poem is a special kind of speech-act. In a good poem there's the trance-like effect of language in its most concentrated, naked form.

powerful blessing art

Writing a poem is a more personal experience, I think, than writing prose. And perhaps reading a poem is a more personal experience than reading prose, though that's harder to say.

reading writing thinking

Writing fiction, for me, is a more indirect form of self-exploration than writing verse. When I'm working on a novel I'm moving characters around and I'm thinking about plot and there's a lot of other things going on at the level of structure and story. With a poem, a single idea or line or emotion can sometimes be enough - there's often a sense, in the best poems, of capturing a single instant. Perhaps poems differ from prose in the degree of solace they can offer - by speaking so personally, so directly, about shared experience. A few lines of poetry can provide comfort.

writing character moving

If you grew up Protestant in Ireland, of course, at least in the twentieth century, there was always a contingent that would never really consider you Irish. Meanwhile in Britain you'd

ireland never-quit

The whole point of writing poetry or fiction is that you get to agonize over whatever it is you want to say, and you finally say it, and you get it as perfect as you can make it. Then you're forced to babble freestyle.

writing-poetry perfect writing

Nabokov quote: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."

writing children thinking

In terms of poetry, I worry about being far from the voice of my childhood, the rhythms of Ulster speech, and the liveliness of its dialect. I know there is a vitality to New York talk, but living among people of different cultures does mean you're forced to homogenize and lose the interesting words and phrases in order to be understood.

mean people interesting

New York is great for writers insofar as you can pay someone to bring you food, to take your washing out and bring it back clean. It enables you. Writers always feel guilty when they're doing anything but writing, and New York allows you to really write all the time if you want to - though my kids put a limit on it.

guilty writing kids

Cargo cults fascinate me partly because Christianity itself is in... by Nick Laird

Cargo cults fascinate me partly because Christianity itself is in many ways a cargo cult.

cult christianity

There used to be one writer rather than a team of writers. It's the old line about a camel being a horse designed by committee.

horse team