The question
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Verbatim recurring item in The Guardian Q&A; two fully readable publisher-hosted respondent pages establish institutional recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I love cities with a centre, like the Market Square in Kraków. They don’t have that in the States. A few cities were built upon Magdeburg rules, but not many. I really like New York, which has no centre (although you could count Central Park). In that respect, I’m like Venclova – I always seek the mediaeval that’s missing in America.
Svetlana Gutkina, Culture.pl, 2019 source ↗
A walk-in wardrobe!
The ability to walk in high heels.
Removal of fear and anxiety.
To have sex three times a week. But who’s counting?
The good part of aging is that you read more and more. You discover poets you never heard of when you were younger.
And now, advice for beginning mystics. Be sober, be intelligent, be educated, rely on the tangible reality as long as you can. Remember that the act of writing is a tiny part of a bigger something. Defend the value of the spiritual experience and if somebody tells you it’s an old fashioned notion, laugh loudly and serenely. Don’t trust priests of the postmodern religion of absolute playfulness.
Young people don’t know that they’re young. We were happy because we felt we were doing something positive and our poems were reaching people in spite of all the censorship and police issues.
This is not an easy question—there are many poets who are my masters. Sometimes I find a poet whose one poem speaks to me with a great force, for instance Giorgios Seferis with his “The King of Asine”, a poem that sheds light on the spiritual situation of contemporary Greek (maybe not only Greek) poetry. ... Yeats with many poems, among them the incredible “Sailing to Byzantium”; a strange poem in the sense that it’s hard to believe Yeats would find in the real Byzantium these miracles of intellect he was longing for. Montale with many poems, with his constant looking for an instant of revelation and enjoying all the impediments, all the obstacles on this road. Mandel'štam who was able to blend a tragic vision of life with a strong sense of humor and a wonderful concreteness of images.
Poetry is more important to me, and if I was forced to choose, it’d be poetry. I often write essays when I’m unable to write a poem, but I also enjoy writing essays, so I don’t suffer while writing them.
Why ardor? Because, I think, there’s not enough of it in our time. Or, at least in our literature. There’s too much lukewarm irony, too much sophisticated indulgence. The tragic dimension disappears in this intellectual environment. That’s why ardor is to be defended.
Mary Berry, Shirley MacLaine, Eve Ensler, Sam Shepard, Hayley Squires, David Hare
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