How to Start Writing (and When to Stop): Advice for Writers [Paperback]

In this witty how-to guide, Wislawa Szymborska has nothing but sympathy for the labors of would-be writers generally: I myself started out with rotten poetry and stories, she confesses in this collection of pieces culled from the advice she gaveanonymouslyfor many years in the well-known Polish journalAt once kind and hilarious, this compilation of the Nobel Prize-winning poets advice to writers is illustrated with her own marvelous collages No reader, not even poetry-phobes, should miss the bright revelations of Nobel laureate Szymborska. Szymborskas poetry had the gift of creating both the happiness of wisdom felt and the ecstatic happiness of the particulars of life fully imagined. From the experience of armies and dogmas and death that shaped her early life, she found a new commitment to the belief that the poetic impulse, however small its objects, is always saner than the polemical imperative, however passionate its certitudes. Wit, wisdom and warmth are equally important ingredients in the mixture of qualities that makes her so unusual and every poem of hers so unforgettable. We love her poetry because we instinctively feel that its author genuinely (though by no means uncritically) loves us. More than any poet I can think of, Szymborska not only wants to create a poetic state in her readers, but also to tell them things they didnt know before or never got around to thinking about. Szymborskas skepticism, her merry, mischievous irreverence and her thirst for the surprise of fresh perception make her the enemy of all tyrannical certainties. Hers is the best of the Western mind  free, restless, questioning, in every way the opposite. Glorious distillations of a capacious mind and heart. A delightful collection of literary ephemera. Her responses may seem harsh, but her criticisms are veiled insights, and her insights unveil depths. Endlessly witty. Szymborskas assessments are refreshing to anyone who has gone through a writers education lãH