Discover Top Posts Tagged with #alan shapiro

This summer it’s finally safe to go back in the water.

To me, the only thing that has kept me going through the years, as a writer, is that deep, private, self-forgetful joy that I feel when I’m working. When you sit down at the table and it’s eight o’clock in the morning and then you look up and it’s, God, it’s three o’clock in the afternoon. All that time has gone by as if in a single moment. And in that prolonged moment, you were completely given over to the task at hand, you were joyful, even if you were writing about how joyless your life has been. Because you had totally forgotten everything but the poem you were trying to make.

— Alan Shapiro, from an interview titled "The Conversation" which was featured in the book "More Songwriters on Songwriting" edited by Paul Zollo (Da Capo Press, November 8, 2016) (via Alive on All Channels)

#alan shapiro #more songwriters on songwriting #paul zollo #writer #work #obsess

Alan R. Shapiro, from “Song and Dance”

#pretty sure i posted lines from this poem on here ten years ago #and i’m back to say that it still undoes me #the dream logic of the speaker oooof #poetry #alan shapiro #on brothers

A poem by Alan Shapiro

The Haunting

It may not be the ghostly ballet of our avoidances that they’ll remember, nor the long sulks of those last months, nor the voices chilly with all the anger we were careful mostly not to show in front of them, nor anything at all that made our choice to live apart seem to us both not only unavoidable but good, but just.

No, what I think will haunt them is precisely what we’ve chosen to forget: those too infrequent (though even toward the end still possible) moments when, the children upstairs, the dinner cooking, one of us would all at once start humming an old tune and we’d dance, as if we did so always, in a swoon of gliding all through the house, across the kitchen,

down the hall and back, we’d sway together, we’d twirl, we’d dip and cha- cha and the children would hear us and be helpless not to come running down to burrow in between us, into the center of the dance that now, I think, will haunt them for the very joy itself, for joy that was for them, for all of us together, something better than joy, and yet for you and me, ourselves, alone, apart, still not enough.