I’m not a poet, but a dissertation writer. But this poet’s advice offered inspiration anyways. 

“I heard someone on NPR a number of years ago, a fiction writer, who said he taught himself how to write stories by retyping Grace Paley’s short stories. It was a ‘I had no idea what I was doing’ confession.” 

Today I’ve been reading an anthro dissertation I think is well written and it has made the one-word-after-another of writing ethnographically to think a little less terrifying.

unwindingblues:

“Write and read, and things will happen.

If you’re a poet, consider making something in addition to poetry. You need to be making something all of the time, whatever it is. Poems, collages, pancakes.

Be humble. Don’t romanticize being humble. Don’t be so easily impressed.”