A Quote by Tony Harrison

Why shouldn't poetry address what happened yesterday and be published in the newspaper? — © Tony Harrison
Why shouldn't poetry address what happened yesterday and be published in the newspaper?
I've been writing since I was sixteen. At first, I wrote mostly short stories and poetry. The first thing I ever had published was a poem about a football game. It was printed in my local newspaper.
I was first published in the newspaper put out by School of The Art Institute of Chicago, where I was a student. I wince to read that story nowadays, but I published it with an odd photo I'd found in a junk shop, and at least I still like the picture. I had a few things in the school paper, and then I got published in a small literary magazine. I hoped I would one day get published in The New Yorker, but I never allowed myself to actually believe it. Getting published is one of those things that feels just as good as you'd hoped it would.
When you're a kid, you see your parents reading the newspaper and you're like, 'God, why are they reading the newspaper?' When you're young, you're not reading the newspaper. But there comes a time in your life when the newspaper's cool.
The House Freedom Caucus has the same agenda today as it did yesterday, and that is to try to address the needs of each of our constituents, address the concerns the voters have been saying they have for a long time.
At least I'm at peace with myself. I have done my best to write a book about what really happened there and why it happened and it's done, it's published. I won't write another book on Vietnam.
I don't think my book is any more shocking than if I went out right now and brought back your local newspaper and found a story that happened around here yesterday or the day before that's just as shocking as anything in my book.
I have been writing poetry since 1975. My first poetry book was published in 1986.
In the end I got a major newspaper in South East Asia to buy a whistleblower's account for a ludicrous bunch of money. Off I toddled, published the story, which the newspaper didn't dare do in the end and then of course I was unleashed into a rollercoaster of denial and backlash.
Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it's a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing.
People who publish poetry today do it from a sense that poetry needs to be published, not because they think they are going to make money.
What's in yesterday's newspaper is today's fish-and-chip paper. If it really affects my life so badly, so personally, then I would do something about it. When it's really out of order, or something possibly detrimental to my family, or I'm driven to such a level that I know that this can be picked up and repeated again, I will just write or e-mail the newspaper editor. So, in the next day's newspaper, it might say, "Tracey Emin says this is factually incorrect."
We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning?
I published, privately, a collection of my serious poetry I had written over the years. I only published 50 copies, which I gave to friends, in a special deluxe edition. It was ridiculously expensive but I'm glad that I did it.
I will live this day as if it is my last. …I will waste not a moment mourning yesterday’s misfortunes, Yesterday’s defeats, yesterday’s aches of the heart, for why should I throw good after bad?
We tell each other stories to help each other live. That’s why I read poetry. I read poetry to stay alive. That’s why I went to poetry in the first place, that’s why I stay with it, that’s why I’ll never leave it.
The same thing happened today that happened yesterday, only to different people.
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