The American Journal Of Poetry

24/09/2025

BTDT. Always quit while you're ahead.

21/09/2025

Ernest Hemingway’s 7 Tips for Writing:
1: To get started, write one true sentence.
“Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.’”
2: Always stop for the day while you still know what will happen next.
“The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck.”
3: Never think about the story when you’re not working.
“I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”
4: When it’s time to work again, always start by reading what you’ve written so far.
“When it gets so long that you can’t do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start.”
5: Don’t describe an emotion—make it.
“In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me...”
6: Use a pencil.
“If you write with a pencil you get three different sights at it to see if the reader is getting what you want him to. First when you read it over; then when it is typed you get another chance to improve it, and again in the proof.”
7: Be Brief.
“It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.”

15/09/2025

12/09/2025

As an editor, my advice was to read 90% and write 10% of the time. Preferably less. The vast majority of college freshmen now are unable to read at grade level; and it's usually much worse. How can you write from an empty well? Creative Writing courses have taken over the "EASY-A!!" all_time favorite, sociology. "EASY-A!!"

12/09/2025

07/09/2025

I used to think Sartre was too smart by half. Then I read his page- turning autobiography, THE WORDS. I soon realized he had written his work as a single long poem. His language lush with poetic imagery. As far as his other books go, I would simply say: "I don't mind if you "lose me"--but first let me FIND you." THE WORDS. Cheap as a broom on amazon.com

03/09/2025

/ William Burroughs /
"What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and sh*ts quantity."
"William S. Burroughs (born February 5, 1914, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died August 2, 1997, Lawrence, Kansas) was an American writer of experimental novels that evoke, in deliberately erratic prose, a nightmarish, sometimes wildly humorous world. His sexual explicitness (he was an avowed and outspoken homosexual) and the frankness with which he dealt with his experiences as a drug addict won him a following among writers of the Beat movement.
Burroughs was the grandson of the inventor of the Burroughs adding machine and grew up in St. Louis in comfortable circumstances, graduating from Harvard University in 1936 and continuing study there in archaeology and ethnology. Having tired of the academic world, he then held a variety of jobs. In 1943 Burroughs moved to New York City, where he became friends with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, two writers who would become principal figures in the Beat movement. Burroughs first took morphine about 1944, and he soon became addicted to he**in. That year Lucien Carr, a member of Burroughs’s social circle, killed a man whom Carr claimed had made sexual advances toward him. Before turning himself in to the police, Carr confessed to Burroughs and Kerouac, who were both arrested as material witnesses. They were later released on bail, and neither man was charged with a crime; Carr was convicted of manslaughter but was later pardoned. In 1945 Burroughs and Kerouac collaborated on a fictionalized retelling of those events entitled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Rejected by publishers at the time, it was not published until 2008." (Britannica)
'The Adding Machine'

26/08/2025

48 years ago this week, this "bouncing baby boy" began to grace my life. He is the kindest, smartest, kindest, kindest man I ever knew. Best "Daddy" and husband, as well. He is a man of great integrity. My son telephones me 2 or 3 times weekly and our conversations generally last for an hour or more. I mean, what kid does that?? A Silicon Valley resident, Bob has devoted his entire life developing ways to champion our environment. His "environment" in this picture looks pretty decent. He's my champ, I promise you! HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BOBBY!--Love. Dad

24/08/2025

/ Isaac Asimov /
"Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is. The only function
of a school is to make self-education easier; failing that, it does nothing."
"Isaac Asimov was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much nonfiction. Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation series, the first three books of which won the one-time Hugo Award for "Best All-Time Series" in 1966. His other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series. The Galactic Empire novels are set in the much earlier history of the same fictional universe as the Foundation series. Later, with Foundation and Earth, he linked this distant future to the Robot stories, creating a unified "future history" for his stories."
W
Honorary vicepresident of MENSA community of prodigious kids and people.
Native name: Yiddish: יצחק אזימאװ ‎
Born: c. January 2, 1920, Petrovichi, Russian SFSR
Died: April 6, 1992, Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
Occupation: Writer, professor of biochemistry
Nationality: Russian (1920-1922), Soviet (1922-1928), American (1928-1992)
Education: Columbia University (BA, MA, PhD)
Genre: Science fiction (hard SF, social SF), mystery, popular science
Subject: Popular science, science textbooks, essays, history, literary criticism
Literary movement: Golden Age of Science Fiction
Years active: 1939–1992
Isaac Asimov (1975). “Science Past, Science Future”, Doubleday Books