How to Start Writing (and When to Stop) by Wislawa Szymborska

"My parting with summer springs forth like a white breast from a tunic bound with gems..." Many questions leap to mind: why a breast, why white, why springing, why from a tunic. The remaining poem leaves the questions unanswered. Instead Adam turns up, tempted by a snake--a bold innovation, but unlikely to catch on. Humanity has long since happily blamed it all on Eve."

How to Start Writing (and When to Stop) is a strange little book. Barely 100 pages long, it's a collection of responses to submissions made to the Polish magazine Literary Life, in the column Literary Mailbox. The responses are presented sans context, as the material or questions they're responding to aren't provided or summarized.

One interesting side effect is that this is the rare book where reading the introduction and afterward, a short interview with Szymborska, are more or less required, as they provide the historical and literary context in which the replies were written. Started in 1968 by Szymborska and her friend, author Wlodzimierz Maciag, Literary Mailbox doled out advice to writers who'd sent in various works--poems, stories, even novels--mostly in the form of cutting abut humorous bon mots or, occasionally, a paragraph or two of feedback:

The fear of straight speaking, the constant, painstaking efforts to metaphorize everything, the ceaseless need to prove you're a poet in every line: these anxieties beset every budding bard. They're curable, if caught in time. Your poems thus far resemble strained translations from direct speech into needless complication--we're tempted to ask for the originals on which this fruitless labor was based. For the moment, though, please believe us, a single metaphor organically linked to the poem's original concept is worth more than 1,500 embellishments added ex post. Please send us something new in a few months. 

Reading through them in bulk can be a bit of a dispiriting exercise, as most of the material collected here is fairly negative; but on the other hand, it's often very funny, and the advice given is good, if perhaps not particularly hard to come by: temper your highbrow language, make your work concrete, keep track of your metaphors and don't write poems about spring ("spring no longer exists in poetry"). Szymborska has the least patience, however, for the lazy or arrogant: her coldest replies are toward those who don't to rewrite, who write only about dour things, who demand publication. Perhaps the cruelest cut here is one of the shortest: "Does the enclosed work betray talent? It does."

But the cumulative effect, especially in conjunction with the closing interview, is that of someone who takes poetry, and writing in general, seriously while still recognizing that there is something a touch silly about treating every letter scrawled onto paper as holy writ. But I hope she never finds this review.