#pen ten

[bostonpoetryslam]

I try to touch words, mine or others, every day. That’s often books and poems and interviews. Sometimes it’s writing, sometimes reading, sometimes editing, sometimes listening. As long as I am actively living in or alongside language, I think I am in process.

Danez Smith, interviewed by Lily Philpott for the PEN Ten

[penamerican]

On writing, ruins, and defining censorship—a PEN Ten interview with Kristen Radtke, author of the graphic memoir Imagine Wanting Only This. @pantheonbooks

[poetsandwriters]

As writers, observation is our way to study, reflect, shape, and express. As writers, we fear and fight surveillance because surveillance is when those who are in power use the tools of observation against the observed...when the behaviors of the observed are inconvenient to those who are in power.

Min Jin Lee (The PEN Ten, 2017)

[bostonpoetryslam]

I would say to not ask for permission to write what you want to write. Whatever inspires you, whatever keeps you up at night where you can see images or sentences in your head, write it.

Advice to young writers from Morgan Jerkins, as told to Jared Jackson for the PEN Ten

[bostonpoetryslam]

Just like all politics are identity politics, and just like the personal is political—all poems are love poems, all poems are political poems. The act of choosing to write about what matters to a person is a potent form of resistance— that human choice and artistic freedom and full range of ideas and possibilities—all that is very much a part of what the fundamentalist right wing would like to see dead.

Brenda Shaughnessy, interviewed by Lily Philpott for the PEN Ten

[bostonpoetryslam]

I have long felt ashamed of the reality that I’ve never been able to maintain a 'writing schedule.' I go long periods attending to other aspects of my life, looking longingly over my shoulder at poems and ideas I’d love to get into. Then when I clear away other responsibilities and I have some time and blank pages in front of me, suddenly I’m skittish, fearful of the quiet, silenced by an inner expectation, and just plain bratty and irritated. I don’t maintain momentum until, in a spate of writing, I am seized by it and then it’s not really inspiration but possession. The ideas and phrases and words start to take over other parts of my life, permeating it. It’s no way to live.

Brenda Shaughnessy, interviewed by Lily Philpott for the PEN Ten

[bostonpoetryslam]

Writers can contribute to society by writing, and by not feeling obligated to write about the daily horrors of this regime, or the most recent atrocity or the worst breaking news—but writing what the full range of human emotion and experience and understanding demands. That may include the breaking news, yes! But it also means love poems, poems about trees and seas, still life poems, poems about death and language and the way the world is—all these kinds of poems can pose a radical rethinking of our ways of knowing and communicating.

Brenda Shaughnessy, interview by Lily Philpott for the PEN Ten

[penamerican]

"I am obsessed with love and how it shapes a reality between two individuals, a reality that others sometimes cannot fully perceive but can sense because of how the lovers' energies interact with one another." — Morgan Jerkins.

In this week's PEN Ten, guest editor Daniel José Olderorgan speaks to Morgan Jerkins, a writer based in New York City and a contributing editor at Catapult.