A Quote by Edward Abbey

In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth. — © Edward Abbey
In writing, fidelity to fact leads eventually to the poetry of truth.
For most of us, fidelity is faithfulness to an obligation, trust, or duty. For the men and women of the FBI, fidelity also means fidelity to country. It means fidelity to justice and the law, fidelity to the Constitution, fidelity to equality and liberty.
What I hate about kitchen-sink dramas is [this idea] that the set is real, therefore you're going to be seeing truth. You have to earn truth. Truth can't be a part of the fact that people appear to talk that way and live in that room. You're looking for the poetry in something, and I don't mean poetry in the fancy sense. Naturalism believes by just replicating a thing you give the truth, rather than earning the truth.
For me, poetry has a strong link to my filmmaking. My films learn from my poetry. In poetry, you're free. You start in the corner and you don't know where it leads you. I have no message, I have nothing I want to tell, I just start and I see where it leads, and it's a big surprise and relief if it's good. That's the ideal state for filmmaking.
Trust grows when people see leaders translate their personal integrity into organizational fidelity. At the heart of fidelity lies truth-telling and promise-keeping.
I was already writing poetry, so I transitioned from writing poetry a cappella to writing over beats, and it was way more exciting to me that way.
I must say a few words about memory. It is full of holes. If you were to lay it out upon a table, it would resemble a scrap of lace. I am a lover of history . . . [but] history has one flaw. It is a subjective art, no less so than poetry or music. . . . The historian writes a truth. The memoirist writes a truth. The novelist writes a truth. And so on. My mother, we both know, wrote a truth in The 19th Wife– a truth that corresponded to her memory and desires. It is not the truth, certainly not. But a truth, yes . . . Her book is a fact. It remains so, even if it is snowflaked with holes.
The Baathist state did two things extremely well. One was create information-gathering intelligence networks and a filing system. There's actually a lot of information on a lot of people and that is a major achievement of a police state. The second one is the promotion of literature and poetry, and the arts generally. So this is a state that's producing mass police archives - surveillance - and poetry. And in fact a lot of the archives are about what poets are writing or what they should be writing.
When I devoted myself to poetry - and poetry is a very serious medium - I don't think the people that knew me as an individual with that tongue-in-cheek kind of humor...well, it didn't always lend itself to my poetry. When you're writing poetry, it's like working with gold, you can't waste anything. You have to be very economical with each word you're going to select. But when you're writing fiction, you can just go on and on; you can be more playful. My editor's main task is to cut back, not ask for more.
It helped my lyric writing so much studying poetry. I thought I knew what poetry was before I immersed myself in it. Poetry is meditative. It's reflective.
Pound described poetry as original research in language, and just as formal experiment in poetry has to try things and has to go too far, so does experiment with writing about politics in poetry and what the politics of poetry is.
In fact, in lyric poetry, truthfulness becomes recognizable as a ring of truth within the medium itself.
I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.
The only thing more important than being good is being real. Authenticity is kinder than resignation without conviction. Truth leads to good faster than good leads to truth. Ultimately truth is good, but you have to live it from the inside out.
Poetry is probably the one field of writing in which it is a mistake to try to psych out editors. In fact, specific marketing advice can sometimes harm the novice poet by enticing him to pursue fashions. The poet's best hope is to sound like nobody else, The finest, most enduring poetry constructs a marketplace of its own.
Fact is fact. Truth is Truth. It does not matter how you feel. We do not listen to our feelings. We believe the truth of God's word.
I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry - writing at writing.
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