Plath, writing on her typewriter, Yorkshire, 1956

But at least I wrote today--my first new poem since leaving Provincetown. And I have a brand new typewriter! Well, actually, it's quite old (appears to be from the forties or so); my Polish grandfather handed it down to me as a gift, since he never uses it anymore. In celebration, some of my favorite quotes from Crazyhorse's Top 100 Quotes About Writing (my list is poetry-oriented, obviously):

“All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath."
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.”
—Red Smith

"You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything."
—Richard Hugo

"Once your life is organized so beautifully that there's a table, and a chair, and a typewriter, that already is an incredible triumph."
—Leonard Cohen

“The poet is he that hath fat enough, like bears and marmots, to suck his claws all winter. He hibernates in this world, and feeds on his own marrow.”
—Henry David Thoreau

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
—Ray Bradbury

"The job of the writer is to win the battle against loneliness."
—Barry Hannah

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”
—Flannery O’Connor

“Perhaps there is another kind of writing, I only know this one: in the night, when fear does not let me sleep.”
—Franz Kafka

"Imaginative work is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground; it is like a spider web attached ever so lightly, but attached to all four corners of the earth."
—Virginia Woolf

“This morning I took out a comma, and this afternoon I put it back again.”
— Oscar Wilde

"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting."
—Robert Frost

"Poetry is my love, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face."
—Anne Sexton

A random assortment

Five Things You Didn't Know About the Romantics

1. At age 22 Shelley insisted on a diet of bread, butter and "a sort of spurious lemonade" until a friend, Thomas Love Peacock, convinced him to start eating meat again. Shelley's complexion improved.

2. The writer John William Polidori developed a serious crush on 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft and "jumped from a wall in an effort to impress her, spraining his ankle badly in the process." A few days later she told him that she thought of him mostly as a little brother.

3. Lord Byron enjoyed singing Albanian songs consisting of "strange, wild howls" while boating with Shelley in order to exacerbate their "contest with the elements."

4. Upon his release from Surrey Gaol for libel charges, Leigh Hunt, a critic and writer, created for himself a new study "which bore a startling resemblance to his prison bower." His books, busts, flowers and piano were all carefully transported from his prison cell. "His new room was lily- rather than rose-themed, but in all other respects it was similar to his prison accommodation."

5. Leigh Hunt gave John Keats the nickname of "Junkets", which Keats hated. "What has become of Junkets," Hunt wondered to Charles Cowden Clarke in the summer of 1817. "I suppose Queen Mab has eaten him."

(The last one is my favorite. Dear me, what has become of Junkets?)

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Oh honey, don't let me walk away from this. If I'm trying to fuck up my own life, then until I figure out why, I think it's best you keep your distance lest I fall in love.

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No one is with me, going fearlessly--that’s the way I live in the dream I saw. I must put my loneliness away, and protect myself, and I’ll learn to be strong. Country road, it’ll take me back to my home. I can feel it now, if I just keep to this far-off country road. It won’t matter how lonely the times get; you’ll never see me cry, I’ll keep my tears at bay. I know I must take heart, and that hurrying is all I can do. Only that way can I forget.

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Ate oscypek (raw sheep cheese handmade in the Tatra mountains) with breakfast this morning. Yesterday evening, we walked around the Old Town, where the buildings still have bullet holes. This afternoon I went to my grandfather's apartment to eat pierogi and borscht and my ninety-five year old uncle told us a story about jumping from a train to flee Communists.

PERFECTION