May 9, 2011
I have to agree with Jennifer Egan about how spending too much energy on a project in any one day can affect the rhythm of the prose. I’ve found it can, too, but a good nap can start you up all over again. But then I don’t have two children to raise—I’m so lucky for that.
She, the writer of “A Visit From The Goon Squad,” attempts to hand-write five to seven pages a day. Some days she writes that much in an hour or two, sometimes it takes as much as four. She usually spends the extra time avoiding getting those pages written. She refuses to write more than that total because she finds it drains her energy too much and that badly affects its rhythm.
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April 18, 2011
Just because she won the award, it doesn’t mean she isn’t a fine poet. She won the Pulitzer for “The Best of It: New and Selected Poems.” This is one of her poems:
THINGS SHOULDN’T BE SO HARD
A life should leave
deep tracks:
ruts where she
went out and back
to get the mail
or move the hose
around the yard;
where she used to
stand before the sink,
a worn-out place;
beneath her hand
the china knobs
rubbed down to
white pastilles;
the switch she
used to feel for
in the dark
almost erased.
Her things should
keep her marks.
The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space—
however small —
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.
Things shouldn’t
be so hard.
“Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard” from The Niagara River by Kay Ryan, Copyright © 2005 by Kay Ryan. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
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