24 quotes found
“The fatal problem with poetry: poems.”
“I dont want what were doing to just end up as notes for a novel.”
“I don’t want what we’re doing to just end up as notes for a novel.”
“I could displace the mystery of my speech onto writing, the latter perhaps recharging the former”
“Since the world is ending, Peter quoted from behind us, why not let the children touch the paintings?”
“Since the world is ending,” Peter quoted from behind us, “why not let the children touch the paintings?”
“Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure tha...”
“Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historicalthe human world of violence and differenceand to reach the transcendent or divine. You're moved to write a poem, you feel ca...”
“I believe she imbued my body thus, finding every touch enhanced by ambiguity of intention, as if it too required translation, and so each touch branched out, became a variety of touches.”
“There were the usual exhortations to purity think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form exhortations poets dont h...”
“Our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable to to experience, if...”
“I formed several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords, understood in a plurality of worlds.”
“I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so th...”
“I had the endless day, months and months of endless days, and yet my return date bounded this sense of boundlessness, kept it from becoming threatening.”
“Each member of this shadowy network resented the others, who were irritating reminders that nothing was more American, whatever that means, than fleeing the American, whatever that is, and that the...”
“And because his narrator was characterized above all by his anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation, the more intensely the author worried ...”
“Poetry": What kind of art assumes the dislike of its audience and what kind of artist aligns herself with that dislike, even encourages it? An art hated from without and within.”
“My experience of my body was her experience once removed, which meant my body was dissolved, and thats all Id ever really wanted from my body, such as it was.”
“All I ask the haters--and I, too, am one--is that they strive to perfect their contempt, even consider bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating...”
“Most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility that cannot be realized by poems. The poet, by his very claim to be a maker of poems, is therefore both ...”
“And when you are foolish enough to identify yourself as a poet, your interlocutors will often ask: A PUBLISHED Poet? And when you tell them that you are, indeed, a published poet, they seem at leas...”
“And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this ha...”
