David Biespiel cracks open the creative process as he candidly tracks his own development as a writer and challenges traditional assumptions about writing that can stifle creativity. The liberating message: Working past the brink of failure--being free to try and discard and try again--is what allows the creative process to playfully flourish, keeping the spirit open to unexpected discoveries. Both beginning and experienced writers—as well as artists, musicians, dancers, and anyone else on a creative path—will benefit from this elegant, surprising, and fresh perspective.
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"Finally, an anti-bullshit book on creativity!"
— James Marcus
"Does for the creative process what Strunk and White did for our approach to grammar and style. Indispensable."
— Marjorie Sandor
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"Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces instead of the advice de rigueur, is a well-spring of ideas for how to jump start the creative process, valuable examples of athletic and visual artists who exercise this proposed method, and, perhaps most importantly, oodles of empathy for the writer and artist who is battling their own stuck process and potentially self-doubt or frustration."
— Hazel & Wren
Charming Gardeners
David Biespiel's epistolary poems investigate the bonds of brotherhood, the ghosts of America's wars, and the vibrancy of love, sex, and intimacy.
Exploring the "insistent murmurs" of memory and the emotional connections between individuals and history, David Biespiel roves the old Confederacy of his native South to Portland, Oregon, taking us through the wildness of the Northwest, the avenues of Washington, D.C., the coal fields of West Virginia, and an endless stretch of airplanes and hotel rooms from New York to Texas to California. These are poems addressed to family, friends, poets, and political rivals, grounded in friendship, camaraderie, and the vulnerability and boldness that defines America.
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"In epistolary poems...that are expansive and excursive, conversational and familiar....from the historical to the mundane, Biespiel’s poems echo Walt Whitman...Biespiel [too] can be prophetic....sprawling and expansive. Highly recommended for all poetry collections."
— Library Journal (starred review)
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"Biespiel’s lengthy, casual set of poems addressed...to various friends and colleagues takes part in several traditions at once. They are travel poems, written on airplanes and from various domestic destinations, often in Biespiel’s own Pacific Northwest; meditations on politics, from a poet known for his prose about culture and politics...; and they are successors to Richard Hugo’s 31 Letters and 13 Dreams, which also addressed far-flung friends...and his looks at U.S. history...are at once informative and grand."
— Publishers Weekly
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"David Biespiel's journey is America's, where the road is both a symbol of arrivals, but also departures, and in between is solitude."
— New Books in Poetry
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*****
Charming Gardeners
University of Washington Press
2013