Poetry quote - Jo Shapcott

I was inspired by this quote from Jo Shapcott, commenting on how ideas become poems:

‘A lot of things jostle in my notebook, things that I have overheard, or 

heard about. In all the jostling are ideas that can link, form 

a new kind of emotional truth, a different kind of truth than just 

simply the facts.'

Notebooks can be invaluable to writers. Image by DvortyGirl

Shapcott's poetry collection Of Mutability (review here) won the Costa Book of the Year, 2010. She is President of the Poetry Society, and teaches on the MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. 

Source of quote: The Telegraph Newspaper.

Raymond Carver on why he chose to focus on short stories & poetry

'Finally, a writer is judged by what he writes, and that's the way it should be. The circumstances surrounding the writing are something else, something extraliterary. Nobody ever asked me to be a writer. But it was tough to stay alive and pay bills and put food on the table and at the same time to think of myself as a writer and to learn to write. After years of working crap jobs and raising kids and trying to write, I realized I needed to write things I could finish and be done with in a hurry. There was no way I could undertake a novel, a two- or three-year stretch of work on a single project.'

Raymond Carver

Image by billmcintyre

Source: Paris Review