“A lot of poets published their own work then; unlike novels, poetry was short, and therefore cheap to do. We had to print each poem separately, and then disassemble it, as there were not enough a's for the whole book; the cover was done with a lino-block. We printed 250 copies, and sold them through bookstores, for 50 cents each. They now go in the rare book trade for eighteen hundred dollars a pop. Wish I'd kept some.”
On Writing Poetry (1995)
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Margaret Atwood 348
Canadian writer 1939Related quotes

It's a roll call of dead books.
Salon interview (1997)

“A book, once it is printed and published, becomes individual.”
"A Note on Cabellian Harmonics" in Cabellian Harmonics (April 1928)
Context: A book, once it is printed and published, becomes individual. It is by its publication as decisively severed from its author as in parturition a child is cut off from its parent. The book "means" thereafter, perforce, — both grammatically and actually, — whatever meaning this or that reader gets out of it.
<!-- [http://www.elainedundy.com/stranger.html DEAD LINK --> "A Stranger Comes to Town" (c. 2001)
Context: I'd always prided myself on how unlike my books were from each other in settings and subject matter. But not until late in my career did I realize that a single thread ran through them, that I'd used the same strategy to catch the reader's attention. It is the old Western movie gimmick: A Stranger Comes to Town. I am that Stranger. Together with the reader I will discover what's going on in that town whether it be Paris, London, New York, Sydney, Tupelo, Ferriday — or in a women's federal prison. And eventually we will make sense of it.
"Unnecessary Roughness" (1971), p. 150
The Good Word & Other Words (1978)

Interview with Richard B. Sale (1969)
Context: But to poetry — You have to be willing to waste time. When you start a poem, stay with it and suffer through it and just think about nothing, not even the poem. Just be there. It's more of a prayerful state than writing the novels is. A lot of the novel is in doing good works, as it were, not praying. And the prayerful state is just being passive with it, mumbling, being around there, lying on the grass, going swimming, you see. Even getting drunk. Get drunk prayerfully, though.

The Novel: What It Is (1893)