Podcast Quote-a-Thon

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts recently, and here are a few excerpts:

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From Tieferet Talk, Tieferet Journal's radio show,  an interview of Molly Peacock by host Melissa Studdard, about Peacock's book The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delaney Begins Her Life's Work at 72, which includes the following:

“You can't be jaded if you really attend to detail. Jaded means life is predictable. But life is not predictable in its exhilarating specificity…When you don’t understand the world and when you’re overwhelmed, one thing you can do is simply to describe it. If you describe it to yourself, it allows you at least to recognize it. You may not be able to comprehend it, but it’s there in front of you, in a palpable way that you are saying back to yourself.” Molly Peacock

“She didn’t meet the goal but she met her vision.” Molly Peacock

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From the New Letters on the Air podcast, the podcast of New Letters Magazine,  a posthumous re-airing of an interview of John Ciardi by host Angela Elam, including the following:


“I realized the photographer is photographing himself…..” John Ciardi

“…submit one’s self to it in the knowledge that the language is more wise more able than the practitioner…” John Ciardi


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From the podcast New Books in Poetry, an interview of James Longenbach with host John Ebersole about Longenbach's recent book The Virtues of Poetry, including the following:

 
"The idea that we are most likely going to be forgotten should liberate the artist and not constrain him or her." John Ebersole


"...the poet whose deepest inclination is to associate risk with submission...." James Longenbach, as quoted by John Ebersole, reading from Longenbach's book


“You can’t write poems all the time. You’ve got to read a hundred of them in order to write one that’s half -decent.” James Longenbach


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Creating Later in Life

This PRI interview with poet Molly Peacock about her new book The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life's Work at 72 (Bloomsbury, USA) touches on two of my keen interests: collage and late life creativity.

The story of Mary Delaney, the woman who invented collage in the 1770s at age 72 or 73 as a response to her life experience, is presented by Peacock in a kind of literary collage. Delaney's process was radical for its time, and she herself was an unlikely artist. Learn how Molly Peacock relates to the process of collage-making as a poet and therefore collagist of words and fragments, and listen to the hopefulness she finds in the awakening of late life creativity as a boon of aging.

As a writer whose poetry has only started to take a serious place in my life now in my mid-40s, I often feel handicapped by my age (especially surrounded in the poetry world by so many recent grads of MFA programs themselves in their 20s with publications and awards I could never aspire to) , so late life creativity is an inspiring topic. Health concerns in my family also make me fearful of the future, so hearing a story like Mary Delaney's does much for me what it did for Molly Peacock, whose own mother died at the age at which Delaney began to blossom artistically and who also has in her family a sense of portending doom due to health issues.

Plus it's good to know collage was invented by a woman. But then, thinking about it, should that innovation have come as a surprise? Who, after all, has to make art with the remnants of time and materials left after taking care of everyone else's lives: men or women artists?

I can't wait to get my hands on this new book by Molly Peacock.