“no poet has ever thought love was soft”
Category: Writing
Untitled by Salma Deera, from Letters From Medea
i am not an open book or a closed book. i am a library.
i am alexandria. bricks, wood, ink and cement going up in smoke.
i take heavens with me.
Untitled, by Salma Deera, from Letters From Medea
The center of every poem is this:
I have loved you.
I have had to deal with that.
Jeanette Winterson, from Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me.
So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is.
It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.”
Anne Carson, from “The Fall of Rome: A Traveller’s Guide,” Glass, Irony, and God
“I lunge for words.
She knocks them away.”
Ocean Vuong, interview for Best American Poetry
I often find myself writing to the terrified versions of myself.
Anne Carson, excerpt of Short Talk on Ovid
Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing.
Susan Sontag, from Reborn: Journals & Notebooks (1947-1963)
To write you have to allow yourself to be the person you don’t want to be (of all the people you are).
Galway Kinnell on poetry
Prose is walking; poetry is flying.
Anna Kamieńska, Industrial Amazement : A Notebook (Trans from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh)
I hobble along on poems.