Sunday, April 01, 2007

Smither on Style

“The secret of style is to be so absorbed in the subject matter that you disappear into the poem. Like Keats says, ‘You should become the leaves of the tree’. It’s not John Keats writing a poem about a tree, it’s about John Keats becoming a tree and feeling like a tree.”
New Zealand poet and author, Elizabeth Smither, is interviewed in StarMag today by my friend Kadek Krishna Adidharma.

She talks how the small provincial city where she lives provides the material for her writing and how the wilderness lives in her writing despite her outward appearance of conformity. She says that writers must train their poetry muscle, and it's necessary to focus one's energies as one gets older.

I thought this was also a good opportunity to post up a photo (snapped while we were having lunch at delicious during the literary festival) of Kadek Kris who wrote the article. He writes for the Jakarta post, and we first met at the Ubud Readers' and Writers' Festival last year.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

What happened to the pic of your friend Kadek? Wasn't it up an hour ago?

Fynn Jamal said...

and it was the best weekend ever. thank you for giving us amateurs the chance to voice out our humble poems.

bibliobibuli said...

animah - something funny was happening with the picture - it was there in the draft but wouldn't show on the screen so i decided to try and repost it later. myabe blogger was updating something.

welcome fynn! love to bobby!

bibliobibuli said...

there, animah. i had to reload the picture from my camera

Anonymous said...

"Becoming" is the basis of all art. It's called "Method acting" -- it's a good skill to learn, to put yourself in the shoes (or trunk) of another so you can see an issue from another point of view.