Austin Kleon (Posts tagged james tate)

Here’s “The Camel” from Return To The City of White Donkeys:

Here’s his Paris Review interview: 

you can just walk by somebody downtown and overhear one phrase and it’s a cliché and suddenly you go, Wow, actually that’s very beautiful when it’s taken out of its normal meaning. It’s very stimulating and it gives you a lot to think about. 

And here’s a little writing tip:

“Another good thing that happens [when you allow yourself to stop writing in the middle and pick up the next day] is that the next day you’re another person… and so you may have come up against a brick wall the day before but the next day you go there and you look at that and you go, no, no, no, I want to go this direction. And you start taking in it a slightly different direction than you thought you were going. And that frees you up quite often and gets you into a new territory… You’ve had experiences, you’ve had dreams, you’ve had idle thoughts, you know. So that’s what I meant by being a new person. You look at the fifteen lines you wrote the day before and you have a different idea. Whereas when you quit the day before you thought you were out of ideas.”

If you don’t know his work, click around here or better yet, just grab his Selected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize.