How to Start Writing (and When to Stop)

Wisława Szymborska

Szymborska’s assessments are refreshing to anyone who has gone through a writer’s “education” at American colleges and universities.

Josh Christensen, First Things

At once kind and hilarious, this compilation of the Nobel Prize-winning poet’s advice to writers is illustrated with her own marvelous collages

How to Start Writing (and When to Stop)

Literature by Wisława Szymborska

Translated from Polish by Clare Cavanagh

In this witty “how-to” guide, Wisława Szymborska has nothing but sympathy for the labors of would-be writers generally: “I myself started out with rotten poetry and stories,” she confesses in this collection of pieces culled from the advice she gave—anonymously—for many years in the well-known Polish journal Literary Life.

She returns time and again to the mundane business of writing poetry properly, that is to say, painstakingly and sparingly. “I sigh to be a poet,” Miss A. P. from Bialogard exclaims. “I groan to be an editor,” Szymborska responds.

Szymborska stubbornly insists on poetry’s “prosaic side”: “Let’s take the wings off and try writing on foot, shall we?” This delightful compilation, translated by the peerless Clare Cavanagh, will delight readers and writers alike.

Perhaps you could learn to love in prose.

Buy How to Start Writing (and When to Stop)

Paperback(published Oct, 05 2021)

ISBN
9780811229715
Price US
17.95
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
112

Ebook

ISBN
9780811229722

Szymborska’s assessments are refreshing to anyone who has gone through a writer’s “education” at American colleges and universities.

Josh Christensen, First Things

Endlessly witty.

Paula Erizanu, Calvert Journal

Her responses may seem harsh, but her criticisms are veiled insights, and her insights unveil depths.

Minor Literatures

A delightful collection of literary ephemera.

Publishers Weekly

Wit, wisdom and warmth are equally important ingredients in the mixture of qualities that makes her so unusual and every poem of hers so unforgettable. We love her poetry because we instinctively feel that its author genuinely (though by no means uncritically) loves us.

Stanislaw Baranczak, New York Times

Szymborska’s poetry had the gift of creating both the happiness of wisdom felt and the ecstatic happiness of the particulars of life fully imagined.

Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker