Michael Schmidt’s keynote lecture from last week’s StAnza festival makes stimulating (and lengthy) reading. I’ve initiated what I hope might turn into a conversation on it at Pffa’s Voyage of Discovery forum here.
There’s a lot in the lecture and I’ll try to collect enough thoughts together to say something about it soon. But for now, I did enjoy his closing salvo:
Ring Lardner had this advice for the young story-writer, which also applies to a starting poet: ‘ A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.’
Heh. Now I know what I’ve been doing wrong all those years.
