Kelly Cherry | The Smart Set

Voice Is Vision

Kelly Cherry — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 13:30:55 +0000

Levine continues: By the time I was twenty-one years old I’d begun to think of myself as something of an accomplished poet; what I lacked — among other things — was a recognizable, consistent voice for my poems. For the most part, American poets make this search for a voice automatically — it’s part of […]

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Voice Is Vision

Kelly Cherry — Thu, 18 Jan 2018 12:03:36 +0000

Literary critics and regular readers often have things to say about a writer’s voice. Many think that the most-read writers are those whose voice is so clear that it can be singled out from all the other authorial voices. Hemingway, with his hard-edged nouns and verbs, is often said to have a powerful voice. Katherine […]

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Poetry’s Affinity for Philosophy

Kelly Cherry — Mon, 27 Nov 2017 13:54:59 +0000

Just as the novel has an affinity for the political but is not required to encompass the political, the poem has an affinity for philosophy but is not required to appeal to or include the philosophical. The writer has choices. In fact, you are free to ignore me on the subject of the poetical/philosophical. One […]

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Novel Politics

Kelly Cherry — Mon, 23 Oct 2017 11:30:57 +0000

I do not say that the novel must be, or more often than not is, political. But where there are characters, the political may be found. A writer chooses to accent, plunge into, or ignore the political, but characters insist upon liking or disliking something that is happening or has happened or may happen. In […]

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Enjoy the Joy of Syntax

Kelly Cherry — Thu, 21 Sep 2017 11:20:15 +0000

Well then, a poet writes a line, or a fiction writer writes a sentence, but how do we judge the order of the words? This is not an easy question to answer. Let’s look at some well-known sentences. Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy includes this famous imperative: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!” Suppose it […]

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The Joy of Syntax

Kelly Cherry — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 11:30:35 +0000

We have all either read or heard about a book titled The Joy of Sex, unless the book is now too old to interest today’s young people, who seem to have preferred to discover the joy of sex firsthand rather than in print. The trouble with relying on sex as a source of joy is […]

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Always Sweat the Small Stuff

Kelly Cherry — Thu, 20 Jul 2017 11:30:41 +0000

The thingies can make the difference between a wonderful poem and one that’s not quite there. We want to write books that expand our view of the world, that dare to examine the relation between thought and action, that want to explore new worlds. How are thingies relevant to these goals? You may as well […]

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Absolutely Sweat the Small Stuff

Kelly Cherry — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 14:50:43 +0000

You have no choice. There is no way around it. “It” being the small stuff. And if you can learn to love it, you will be happier. Face it: the big stuff is surrounded by the small stuff, to all of which you must attend. You cannot back out. You cannot trust someone else to […]

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What You Make, Make to Last

Kelly Cherry — Fri, 12 May 2017 11:30:33 +0000

Until we learn what sentences can do, we tend to underrate them. We treat sentences as if they were floors, a kind of planking, something we have to walk on in order to get to the next room. We are oblivious to the reality, which is that the planking is alive and walking all over […]

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What You Make, Make To Last

Kelly Cherry — Thu, 20 Apr 2017 13:30:52 +0000

To structure is to survive. If you want your work to have even the tiniest chance of lasting — this is a dream hope; a stage of adolescence; your writing will not last, but it may hang around for a year or two — it must be well structured. If your ideas are flimsy, your […]

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