Month: January 2021

Poet Mary Oliver on scheduled writing sessions

David Evans

If Romeo and Juliet had made appointments to meet, in the moonlight-swept orchard, in all the peril and sweetness of conspiracy, and then more often than not failed to meet — one or the other lagging, or afraid, or busy elsewhere — there would have been no romance, no passion, none f the drama for which we remember and celebrate them. Writing a poem is not so different — it is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind. They make appointments with each other, and keep them, and something begins to happen. Of they make appointments with each other but are casual and often fail to keep them: count on it, nothing happens.

I have no aspiration to write poetry, but I daresay a morsel of this applies to my own writing. This is from the late, great Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry.

a romantic view of causal inference

David Evans

In Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The modern Prometheus, the title character, scientist Victor Frankenstein, is trying to solve a mystery when an idea occurs to him, and we come across this fabulous line.

“I could not doubt it. The mere presence of the idea was an irresistible proof of the fact.”

My papers would be a lot shorter (and a lot of them are already short) if I could rely on “proof by idea.” In an authorial twist, Leslie Klinger’s annotated edition claims that these sentences were added by Percy Shelley to Mary Shelley’s draft, lest you feel tempted to hold Ms. Shelley responsible for these unidentified claims.