Kortney Garrison

Homeschooling With Ease

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Advice: Lower Your Standards

23 November 2019 by Kortney 3 Comments

I live in William Stafford country. His words and work permeate this place. And it is a goodly inheritance.

His collection on writing called Crossing Unmarked Snow came out while I was in school, so it became our unofficial textbook. Come January, I think it might be my first re-read of the new decade.

Often when I’m writing I hear his advice over my shoulder: if you get stuck, lower your standards and keep going. I think sometimes when people encounter that axiom, they focus on being stuck or lowering their standards. But I think our attention should be to keep going.

That’s where the magic starts.

In the daily return. The simple companionship of attention and a notebook. A way to discover what we didn’t know.

Click here to see all the Listening to My Life :: Homeschooling an MFA in Poetry posts.

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Filed Under: books and such, learning all the time

Comments

  1. Tom Hardy says

    23 November 2019 at 9:15 pm

    It was incredibly enlivening when I began to allow myself the use of assonance in my song lyrics and got unshackled from a thousand contrivances imposed by my prior insistence on perfect rhyme.

    Reply
    • Kortney says

      24 November 2019 at 7:24 am

      Recently I read something (maybe in Roethke?) about every word being more like every other word than like silence…and in that, every word rhyming with each other.

      Reply
      • Tom Hardy says

        26 November 2019 at 4:04 pm

        “Words move, music moves
        Only in time…
        Words, after speech, reach
        Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
        Can words or music reach
        The stillness…”
        Eliot
        “Burnt Norton” V

        Reply

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