Month: October 2005

Adamshick-Austen

For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

—

And when I didn’t speak / I became a secret, a testimony / against my own body. — Carl Adamshick

I was immense / and empty out there. I filled myself / with their lives, I stored up / the whole town, generations / of the town, other towns. / I have them now and it’s nothing. — Carl Adamshick

Apaths are an integral part of the sociopath’s arsenal and contribute to sociopathic abuse. Sociopaths have an uncanny knack of knowing who will assist them in bringing down the person they are targeting. It is not necessarily easy to identify an apath; in other circumstances, an apath can show ample empathy and concern for others—just not in this case. The one attribute an apath must have is a link to the target. — Addiction Today

It’s too / ridiculous, this ordering the noise / the past makes into music. What’s it for? — Kim Addonizio

like the brother I spent my childhood hiding from in my father’s closet / below rows of suit coats, next to the electric buffer for his shoes. — Kim Addonizio

Teacher teacher me / in the front / can’t / you see / my hand / pray / tell / why / white / hands / keep / grasp / -ing / at / all / hours / in the / dark — Matt Adrian

In the leaf litter, something tries to hide its own heartbeat. — Matt Adrian

we are what we are, / the two of us pulling together to form a single passage / through the dark — Neil Aitken

I seem to myself, as in a dream, / An accidental guest in this dreadful body. ― Anna Akhmatova

We’re waiting for a war to begin / or a delectable sweet to eat after lunch. — Jeff Alessandrelli

To me, in a poem the writer reaches for the reader and the reader reaches back—in this moment of contact the unknowable or unthought is illuminated. — Kazim Ali

I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them. ― Dorothy Allison

It’s the first thing I think of when trouble comes―the geographic solution. Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over. What hides behind that impulse is the conviction that the life you have lived, the person you are, is valueless, better off abandoned, that running away is easier than trying to change things, that change itself is not possible. ― Dorothy Allison

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is what it means to have no loved version of your life but the one you made. ― Dorothy Allison

All my life / I’ve always dreamed of a somewhere. / It took me awhile to realize / that somewhere is here. — Odessa Alpuerto

The trains let us / on and the trains let us off. We wait for the next. Our bags / overflow. These people, this pretty. We stand on the / platforms, dressed like we are cured of pretty. — Hala Alyan

but though I have looked everywhere, / I can find nothing / to give myself to: / everything is / magnificent with existence — A. R. Ammons

how heavy this bag of knowledge as I hit the road again, / the road inside me, the questioning, the yes, hope, / that finally, in a day I’ll not live to see, we’ll be free. / Or not: our telescopes and satellites still roaming / when the earth is an orbiting, smoking ash, / sending back the knowledge that might have saved us. — Doug Anderson

What can a man / like me do besides take one word after another / right out of my body and hand it to you? — Doug Anderson

I plucked up an acorn, / thinking I would find a place to plant it on my walk. / Not beside the road. / Not in the mowed field by the cemetery. / Not in a stranger’s lawn. / There’s something about an errand to plant an oak that shows much of what troubles our world, / a place where a new tree is inconvenient. — Jarod K. Anderson

There are two paths to magic: imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water’s surface. Paying attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world. An acorn. The geometry of a beehive. The complexity of whale song. The perfect slowness of a heron. — Jarod K. Anderson

There’s something about an errand to plant an oak that shows / much of what troubles our world, / a place where a new tree is inconvenient. — Jarod K. Anderson

This morning, I found a bluejay feather tucked like a bookmark in the pages of red and yellow leaf litter.

That book tells the story of here, where unguessable magic drifted through time like seeds on the wind, taking root where I would find my parcel of days and sip black coffee on a muddy trail.

What can we say about a universe, ancient and vast, that populates its tiniest corners with oaks and jays, impossible bits of art hidden away in a turning gallery beneath an ocean of chance and empty dark?

What is that if not kindness?

Kindness for its own sake.

— Jarod K. Anderson

This bizarre pretense that everyone is equally good at everything doesn’t stand up to reality. — Annoyed Librarian

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. — Diane Arbus

What remains is this deer at the edge of the woods, my dappled antlers my toiled meaning & no meaning making music like a heretic. After all what is a soul crawling out of the black dirt if it has no teeth or nails. — William Archila

At first we loved because / we startled one another. — Rae Armantrout

To believe non-referentiality is possible is to believe language can be divorced from thought, words from their histories. — Rae Armantrout, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Vol 1, No. 1

The wordplay / Between us gets very intense when there are / Fewer feelings around to confuse things. — John Ashbery

You can always catch up with the past. I think it’s very important to read what’s being written now and figure out how you stand in relation to it and how it represents what you do or don’t want to get into. — John Ashbery

About suffering they were never wrong, / The old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position: how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along — W. H. Auden

Everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster. — W.H. Auden

The association of singing with women is an inevitable consequence considering the connection between the patriarchal construction and representation of woman first and foremost as a bodily entity and the presence of more bodily elements in singing than in instrumental music. To elaborate on the latter, there is literally more body in the singing voice (“more breath, more diaphragm muscles, a more open mouth”) because of the intensified and exaggerated vocalization when singing. Furthermore, singing is inherently a more embodied, more carnal realm than instrumental music in that the sound is produced within the performer’s body, from her throat, whereas in instrumental music, the sound source, whether piano, violin or others, is placed outside the performer’s body. — Linda Austern and Inna Naroditskaya, Music of the Sirens

Our lifetime is so brief. And to live it out in these circumstances, among these people, in this body? Nothing to get excited about. — Marcus Aurelius

The world as a living being — one nature, one soul. — Marcus Aurelius

if it’s true we’re infused with something not found in doorknob bird or bee / why am I confused about all the important things — Elizabeth Austen

What does she see / when she looks back at me, glassed-in, / unfeathered, gaping? — Elizabeth Austen

All my life, certainly for as long / as I’ve known I had a life, I was / like the sparrow right now outside / my window, flying headfirst, incessantly, / into what must seem, to her, like sky. — Cameron Awkward-Rich

Backer-Bryom

For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

—

My birds of prey are not bomb / droppers, but my broken immune system clawing / and pecking inside my body’s basement. — Sara Backer

Are we willing to put love into action even if we ourselves don’t physically survive? — Carolyn Baker

If the answer is ‘yes,’ then two things are essential. First, bearing witness to the deepening horrors of climate chaos; and second, committing ourselves to compassionate service to all other living beings—since they are going to suffer with us. — Carolyn Baker

Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain

The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.

—

by Li Bai, translated By Sam Hamill

To be disabled is to have a minority body, but not to have a broken or defective body. — Elizabeth Barnes

Midfield,
attached to nothing,
the skylark singing.

— Basho

Wherever we are in life, whatever people we are responding to, let us be witnesses to those who are most abandoned, who need our care. — Father Michael Bassano

I think nature is personal. — Jan Beatty

On this thoroughly unique and irreplaceable Saturday morning, it was like this. This is my inadequate attempt to capture it, even though it can’t be captured, can’t be preserved. — Lynn Behrendt

This is my inadequate attempt to capture it, even though it can’t be captured, can’t be preserved. — Lynn Behrendt

It is silly: this constant falling, this ebullient animal / tumble, this dizzy, over-worded, breathless groping / to some place only named in ancient, unknown tongues. — John Belk

When the hot air fades / when the dampness comes / in sleep / in waking / when I am ancient in my movements / a humming corpse / resting on / pillows / How will I be found / will they feed me the coins I will need / Who will kiss my falling / when I fall — Chase Berggrun

I give my best to the shape / of clouds and the dead / in their resting places — Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

I give my best to the shape / of clouds and the dead / in their resting places — Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal

There are four channels on the black and white TV which seem swept from the cosmic corners of an emptiness you’re learning about in school, along with Sex Ed and its ragged chalkboard diagrams of ungainly organs deployed with all the dignity of trying to smuggle accordions across state lines. — Simeon Berry

There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places. — Wendell Berry

Even after we called the neighbors for water, more water, and the volunteer fire department came to mist the dying herd, cattle kept falling. They died all day long until even the sun grew tired of watching. — Darla Biel

Each moment / builds a new universe / and I need to find / you there. — Simeon Berry

The only way people can be writers is if they feel like they can be one. — Lisa Bickmore

When you memorize a poem, it inhabits you, and you inhabit it. — Kim Blaeser

Writing is not language, but merely a way of recording language by visible marks. — Leonard Bloomfield, Language (1933)

A cocktail dress achieves its effect through elegant abbreviation; shouldn’t the poem do the same? — Dave Bonta

And in any case the whole notion of luck represents an absurd attempt to project consistent, self-centered narratives onto chaotic, impersonal events. — Dave Bonta

We are little more than large and awkward guests in a world of insects, I sometimes think.— Dave Bonta

we bought it all / the cheat and the war / and the nothing / but night tomorrow — Dave Bonta

The subject of pain is the business I am in. To give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering. The existence of pain cannot be denied. I propose no remedies or excuses. — Louise Bourgeois

What modern art means is that you have to keep finding new ways to express yourself, to express the problems, that there are no settled ways, no fixed approach. This is a painful situation, and modern art is about this painful situation of having no absolutely definite way of expressing yourself. — Louise Bourgeois

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat. ― Jorge Luis Borges

Something signals me / to skulk the pasture with the soft paw / of the body, to snap the hasp / and climb inside the kitchen window. / A wolf’s no scavenger. / Hunger licks its tongue / across the danger of my teeth. — Ash Bowen

It seems illogical to preserve a social order when the social order is itself only a false dilemma of death. — Anne Boyer

Emotions … continue to cause suffering until we experience them where they live in our body. — Tara Brach

Sensations in the body are ground zero, the place where we directly experience the entire play of life. — Tara Brach

When we leave our bodies, we leave home. — Tara Brach

When you’re with fear and befriending it, the who you are enlarges, and [the fear] becomes like a wave in your ocean. — Tara Brach

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. — Ray Bradbury

The comfort / of unhealthy patterns blushing harder than rubies. / I would do what I couldn’t as a child and turn from you. — Traci Brimhall

We gender people as soon as we see them. That’s just the American way. — KB Brookins

Dying or illness is a kind of poetry. It’s a derangement. — Anatole Broyard

Accessibility wasn’t one of the virtues I learned coming up. Great poems are rough, crude, loud, gnarled, hermetic. They are thinking great ideas but they aren’t talking to you about it. — Sharon Bryan

When you know what a poem is trying to do and understand how it is working, then you become useful. The poem has every clue you’re ever going to get. Stop worrying about what’s not there. You can do what you want with a poem, but it’s only OK if you take it back to the poem and the poem says, Yeah, that’s OK. — Sharon Bryan

We are all born in Oklahoma, in a certain way. — Andrew Brusletten

and when people come to visit and / shoot my hours through the head they / offer nothing interesting or constructive. / I find myself resenting them and / their chatter / their idle ways / since I am always fighting for each minute — Charles Bukowski

Like a hummingbird in our hands, we must hold our convictions with a relaxed fist — Laura Caitlin Burke

You can tell them anything if you just make it funny, make it rhyme. And if they still don’t understand you, then you run it one more time. — Bo Burnham

We grow wings to fly but have roots to return to and there, and there, for the grace of God, go I. — Mark Burns

One very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and don’t know they know. … Once the breakthrough is made, there is a permanent expansion of awareness. But there is always a reaction of rage, of outrage, at the first breakthrough. … So the artist, then, expands awareness. And once the breakthrough is made, this becomes part of the general awareness. — William S. Burroughs

it takes me 10 minutes / to write a poem / sometimes / & then / I want to whisper or / shout it about / town — Mairead Byrne

With our thoughts we make the world. — from the Dhammapada, as translated by Thomas Byrom

Cage-Cummings

For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

—

An audience is a group of people listening. The more devotedly this is done, that is the more attentive one is to each sound and the more curiosity one has about those to come, the more an audience is an audience. — John Cage, from Zero: Contemporary Buddhist Life and Thought, Vol. III, 1979.

We have eyes as well as ears, and it is our business while we’re alive to use them. — John Cage

When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave. — John Cage

I can’t think how you bring yourself / to cut your throat like that yourself—I asked / the counselor they called in to the school, / and she said something like, “What better ink / to write the language of the heart?” — Rafael Campo

Artists, like everyone else, must take up their oars, without dying, if possible—that is to say, by continuing to live and create. — Albert Camus

Because the fields of my childhood vanished, / I carry smoke in my hair. I bed dank dirt in my / hands. — Tina Carlson

Everything I know about love and its necessities / I learned in that one moment / when I found myself / thrusting my little burning red backside like a baboon / at a man who no longer cherished me. — Anne Carson

There are things unbearable. / Scorn, princes, this little size / of dying. — Anne Carson

Trust me. The trotting animal can restore / red hearts to red. — Anne Carson

Slowly the summer warmth was drained from the water. The young crabs, mussels, barnacles, worms, starfish, and crustaceans of scores of species had disappeared from the plankton, for in the ocean spring and summer are the seasons of birth and youth. — Rachel Carson

So sweet / are we / to know / earth’s calloused / verses — Camille Carter

I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask. / I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured. — Catullus

Don’t hope for things elsewhere: there is no ship for you, there is no road. As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world. — C. P. Cavafy

Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, / you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world. — C. P. Cavafy

Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong / and my heart lies buried like something dead. — C. P. Cavafy

After this I’m going to cut out my tongue and use it as fertilizer for all / the flowers I’m going to grow in every window of my house. / I’m telling you there’s an after. / I’m telling you this will end. — Sarah Certa

I want to spend a day not thinking my usual thoughts: / how many warm beds there are in the world and how still my hands are homeless. — Sarah Certa

we / are just like everyone else / trying to build a house out of flames / in a world full of flames — Sarah Certa

how you pull me out from under / the blue-glass table / then fix me like bark / against your kitchen counter. / how you separate the blood / from sacred deermeat. easy, / easy. — Amrita Chakraborty

What I can see is that saving public land is saving ourselves. — Cody Chamberlain

The town I call home, it boasts a bumper crop / of white life. Our white life seem ready to grow / on all the land we can claim. — Sara Biggs Chaney

Read poetry so when you are no longer lonely and are wrapping your arms and legs around your beloved your beloved will tell you “I have never known arms and legs to have such wild abandon.” — Dan Chelotti

The world seems to be a certain thing / until a moment illuminates the text / so brightly it becomes unreadable. — Allisa Cherry

Have a sense of gratitude to everything, even difficult emotions, because of their potential to wake you up. — Pema Chödrön

The pain is the wake-up call. — Pema Chödrön

Someday we’ll lie in dirt. / With mouths and mushrooms, the earth / will accept our apology. — Franny Choi

Our glances, our smiles are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths; our blood flows and we extend ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we’re not afraid of lacking. — Hélène Cixous

I tell myself in my more curmudgeonly moods that relationships with animals are preferable to those with people. I keep forgetting that people are in fact animals: complicated, conflicted, gloriously noble and hilarious animals. — Chris Clarke

Get as close as possible to who and what you are, and you will become original. — Kevin Clark

To write in your own voice means taking a risk. — Kevin Clark

We carry different authentic voices within ourselves. — Kevin Clark

You have to risk embarrassment to write in a voice that is yours. — Kevin Clark

I wonder what Rorschach / would make of this place, this / asymmetrical black hole or space / or face or possibly the shape / of things to come — Kim Clark

I’m tired / of small catastrophe, the delicate / balance between shrugged-off accident / and tiny horror — Abigail Cloud

Writing is an act of love. If not, it is merely paperwork. — Jean Cocteau

a body is a meaty thing, a weighty one / it lugs itself around, beats on glass, destroys itself in what light remains — Elizabeth Colen

Feels like I’m drifting off / to some great mistake—here, to a nameless / atoll somewhere in the Pacific, / seeking—what? — Daniel Comiskey and C.E. Putnam

i came along like an accident, just after my mother’s first miscarrage. i dropped into her life like a toy from a claw machine. who’d thought she’d win a prize, much less the one she wanted. — John Compton

those poems, / like mottled wings, / are my soul. — John Compton

If you haven’t been stabbed or shot, if they took your money under threat and left, consider a poem. — CAConrad

Poetry has NEVER BEEN MORE ALIVE AND I FILL MY TANK WITH IT EVERY MORNING ALIVE ALIVE ALIVE! — CAConrad

The point of experiencing love is to engage the greater openings. — CAConrad

We need to treat our creative organs like they are vital organs, and we need to protect them. — CA Conrad

Instead of writing a book review, / I write another review of my own / pair of socks. What makes someone else / a perfect judge of my legs? I’m my own / tiny branch in a series of broken / poetry books that I made myself. — Juliet Cook

Poetry is not all that popular; nor is my vagina. — Juliet Cook

Oh and let’s not forget / the heartbreak, / the heartbreak of newly-mown grass, / of any and every awful beauty. — Kay McKenzie Cook

We have homeostatic biological systems. Disease results because of an imbalance of homeostasis. — Dr. Ryan Cooley

how do you come / to be when there are no others, except / science fiction? I am a child feeling / extraterrestrial; whose history, untold, / is not enough. Anyway, it begins with abduction — Rio Cortez

In one story I come from a sea god / with the forest as my mother, and in / the other, I have no mother at all. — Rio Cortez

he loved her as a drowning man / loves a drowning woman, weary, fish-breathed / and failing — Krista Cox

In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth. — Caleb Crain, from “Twilight of the Books”

The third and the last— / he died with / and gave up loving / and lived with her. — Robert Creeley

One eye goes laughing / One eye goes crying / Through the trials / And trying of one life — King Crimson

A California of snow and the surprise / Of illness. I throned myself in the white / Noise of its silence and watched as the world / Fell away. — Cynthia Cruz

An IV drip of consumption, whether or not / I want it. Fashion and excess. / Decadence, and its magnificent diamond / Of glut, / Glittering its warn doom and contagion. — Cynthia Cruz

Subverted my psychosis to watery ornament. / Was found drowned in a cream velvet / Mini gown, mind blown out like a city / With no electricity, all lines cut. / The brain, a kaleidoscopic disco. — Cynthia Cruz

There will be no other / Life, other than the sweet / Lavender, sweet / Blossoming dream / Of this one. — Cynthia Cruz

This is not meant to be a koan / Or a fable. / I am telling you everything. / One day they’ll remove / The memory out of me. — Cynthia Cruz

The others didn’t let me peep, she mewed beneath a grate / until I found her: mutilated, undernourished. No sibling, no mother. Her / paws were dry magic beads. I touched them. All the love I was not allowed / to give in the human house, she let me. She let me touch them one by one. — Jessica Cuello

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud / and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows / higher than soul can hope or mind can hide) / and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart / i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart) — E. E. Cummings

Danowsky-Dunn

For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

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Right now, I’m doing something that matters to me—which is simply putting words on a page. It’s a privilege, too, the allowance to write these words for an audience that I care about—an audience that is interested in what I have to say. — Mark Danowsky

From a Hindu perspective, you are born as what you need to deal with, and if you just try and push it away, whatever it is, it’s got you. — Ram Dass

The future is light drifting like water, / light emptying itself on the white / beaches of the earth, / on the sidewalks of cities, / at roadsides where the dying watch their own ghosts / rising — Joyce Ellen Davis

My lovers know the blast of my chaotic giving; / they tremble at the whip of my supple thighs; / you cross me at your peril, I swallow light / when the warm of anger lashes me into a spin — Kwame Dawes

This is how a man seizes / what he wants, how a man / turns the world over in dreams, / eats a solid meal and waits / for death to come like nothing, / like the open sky, like light / at early morning. — Kwame Dawes

We who gave, owned nothing / learned the value of dirt, how / a man or woman can stand / among the unruly growth, / look far into its limits, / a place of stone and entanglements, / and suddenly understand / the meaning of a name, a deed — Kwame Dawes

this is how it all starts, and now that they’ve found me / things are only going to get louder around here / louder until I give up or give in. — Holly Day

I believe authentic peer support lives at the intersection of love and outrage. — Pat Deegan

For a long time I considered / Hating everything in the world. Instead, I decided / To huff it. All of it. Porcelain. Impotence. The taste of wounds. — Nick Demske

I will make me beautiful if it takes / Uglying everything else — Nick Demske

We draw ponies. / Over and over again, to keep the fires of hell / At bay. Pretty ponies. — Nick Demske

But we are exoskeletons, / vain and lordly, thinking we are hair, skin, nails, teeth.— Risa Denenberg

Either you swallow the pill or you refuse to swallow the pill. You can’t do both, our current model of time being what it is. — Risa Denenberg

My bedraggled / animal-body vetoes evolution, wants to crawl off / behind the couch and die like an old house-cat. — Risa Denenberg

There is not enough salve / on the continent to swathe this busted body — Risa Denenberg

My love for you, my love, for my friends, untethers and floats, / snaps apart and off me like the I.V. tubes and monitor wires / the flailed arms of an octopus unfolding without gravity, / as I reach up in a Frankensteinian effort to shut off my monitors, / the constant alarming of the human prototype my own body keeps rejecting — Tory Dent

I wanna end this prophylactic tour / Afraid that no-one around me / Understands my potato / Think I’m only a spud boy / Looking for a real tomato — DEVO

In my chest I am two-hearted always— / love and what love becomes / arrive when they want to, and hungry. — Natalie Diaz

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The things that never can come back, are several. / Childhood, some forms of Hope — the Dead. — Emily Dickinson, as written on the back of a coconut cake recipe card

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That watery light people get sometimes / when they’re first arriving / and when / they’re / leaving for good — Michael Dickman

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I love to watch them sheathe themselves mid-air, / shut wings and ride the light’s poor spine / to earth, to touch down in gutters, in the rainbowed / urine of suicides, just outside Bellevue’s walls. — Deborah Digges

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Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head / Warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood / But then I was young. — Carol Ann Duffy

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Any fictionist knows that one event, even if poorly executed, can make another happen, the slightest authenticity creating a path to the hidden. — Stephen Dunn

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You come to the realization that you probably hate your partner. Naturally, you marry this person, move upstate, and build a tree house. — Bryn Durgin

Einstein-Evans

For more than a decade, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically.

—

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. — Albert Einstein

We need to decolonize our language. — Nawal El Saadawi

Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something / Upon which to rejoice — T. S. Eliot

To be conscious is not to be in time / But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden, / The moment in the arbour where the rain beat, / The moment in the draughty church at smokefall / Be remembered; involved with past and future. / Only through time is time conquered — T.S. Eliot

I have three closets and one / is filled with my black clothes—the crying closet—dark when the door opens— / clothes difficult to tell apart — Carol Ellis

he will smile at her way of doing things / the way he smiled at your way of doing things / and at night, he will draw her close, / like you, assimilated, beloved. — C Malcolm Ellsworth

From the porch / I watched you become shadowless, / then featureless, until I knew / you couldn’t see either, and still / the dusk rang out, your aim that easy; / between the iron stakes you had driven / into the hard earth yourself — Claudia Emerson

What I want to say is that culture—art, if you like—has an important set of functions in preparing us for the future. — Brian Eno

You are a poet and sometimes it helps you / and sometimes it distances you from others. — Shira Erlichman

Let me warn you now: / There is no shame in running away, no / lie you have to tell for being afraid. We / are all supposed to jump. — Justin Evans

I want the right line / for our marriage, but the exact emotion / is a peach packed in ice. I cannot accept this, / though clearly, here it is, cold / and ripe, and now, in hand, passed / between us like a desperate artifact. — Kerry James Evans

Change one letter and womb is bomb. — Kate Evans

Faizullah-Fritsch

For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

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The flyswatter was / a whip. The flyswatter was a flyswatter. / I was thrown into a fire ant bed. I wanted to be / a man. It was summer in Texas and dry. / I burned. — Tarfia Faizullah

What matters is the individual movements that you can have with other people and maybe, by this strange magic, you write these little characters in black and white on a page and someone picks it up somewhere and they feel heard or understood or comforted. Even if the poem is about the darkest thing in the world, someone else felt that. You know, you can talk in these big terms. All I can do is speak for myself and say my life has been literally saved by some of those moments. — Joseph Fasano

for years she tells me / we are never so blessed / as to lose the things / we have left behind / or to survive clean / the water’s determined rinse — Jose Faus

I never saw writing as being not art. They’re the same medium. They’re giving you the same things.” — Jose Faus

[paraphrasing] In painting, there are some things that come easier. He talks about the time he saw a log pop out when painting two colors against each other. Painting gives you a strong emotional response, makes you feel more. Words make you feel, they want to go deeper. Dan Jaffe talks about the way words rub against each other. Words can be strict. Color can be freeing. — Jose Faus

Jose Faus tries to find enough “animas” in something to be interested in it. He refers to switching between languages as “code switching.” His real father was out of his life by the time he was three years old.

One nail at the foot / a fecund rabbit / a slithering snake / a bouquet infused / with rose madder eyes / alizarin fugitive color / dripping cadmium bands / thick impasto whites / layer upon layer / ceremoniously ordained — Jose Faus

God is a potato / and a can of boiling water / and it has never been otherwise. / There is no god you cannot eat / or swing against an enemy. — Ari Feld

I saw one in a grocery store / come out with a pint / I saw another come out / with nothing / I saw another putting a rope / through the loops of his pants / I saw one / with a bird on his shoulder — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The small one, / the one joined with the sky, / the one we carried, / the one we sang / into the blue, into the black — Greg Field

You’re not a citizen of language or memory, / but I am. — Kathleen Flenniken

Let me drift, let me come / to nothing for a while. Let nothing come to me, let / a hush move with the seeping certainty of water — Ruth Foley

our liver is oak, / it filters your blood like rain through / the leaves it clutches even in January. / It sprouts acorns and will not let them drop. — Ruth Foley

Your liver is oak, / it filters your blood like rain through / the leaves it clutches even in January. / It sprouts acorns and will not let them drop. — Ruth Foley

I don’t want to go down the street smiling like a salesman trying to sell the product of me. — Melissa Fondakowski

Reading poetry requires a quietness not unlike meditation, where oftentimes attempts at “making logical sense” of a poem will both alienate you from the poem, and ruin the poem’s—for lack of a better word—duende. — Melissa Fondakowski

Poetry is what maintains our capacity for contemplation and difficulty. — Carolyn Forché

I am 18 years of age and a proud member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma. I believe the most intoxicating aspect about poetry is its tendency to defy the structures that we’ve built around ourselves to comprehend the world in a material, systematic way, and open our eyes, ears, and mind to the unspoken insight of the soul. I truly believe that, in the face of rising hate, greed, and abuse of power, poetry is a form of unapologetic liberation. — Domonic Leading Fox

That’s the very bluff which peers down into / the river. The enemy: the river— / the water violent flowing surging so horribly and deadly / it’s the Devil, I reckon. — Dominic Leading Fox

He curled as / tightly as when he fell. Head tucked. / Isn’t that how it is? Head up, head down, / death. No matter the matter. — Sarah Miller Freehauf

Subtle ways to sign our names / in concealed, sheltered places / where those who search will find them. — Meg Freer

I cannot accept that the opposite of desire looks so much like loss. — Joseph Fritsch

Gallaher-Guzlowski

For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

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By arrogance I mean that when you are writing you must assume that the next thing you put down belongs not for reasons of logic, good sense, or narrative development, but because you put it there. — John Gallaher

It is impossible to write meaningless sequences. In a sense the next thing always belongs. In the world of imagination, all things belong. If you take that on faith, you may be foolish, but foolish like a trout. — John Gallaher

Time doesn’t know which genre this is, / so it’s using all of them. — John Gallaher

The wealthiest 1% are protected by the law but are not bound by it. The bottom 99% are bound by the law but are not protected by it. — Scott Galloway

Like species, poems are not invented, but develop out of a kind of discourse, each poet tensed against another’s poetics, in conversation. — Forrest Gander

At least when placentas clap their / hands while we all play / patty cake, / they are not foreshadowing / the sins / of generations that / do nothing else but / feast upon weakness. — Robert Gano

Some people say I communicate exactly / like goose liver / force fed by / an invisible-handed economy — Robert Gano

Everything but “I LOVE YOU” is small talk. — Andrea Gibson

The first time in my life I’d ever rested, / the first time I didn’t have to play a role / I’d never really wanted to get. / That’s the medicine it is / to be finally seen by someone. — Andrea Gibson

I say moon is horses in the tempered dark, / because horse is the closest I can get to it. — Jack Gilbert

The heart / never fits / the journey. / Always / one ends / first. — Jack Gilbert

We stand / looking at the ruin of our garden / in early November. — Jack Gilbert

Earth pollution identical with Mind pollution, consciousness / Pollution identical with filthy sky. — Allen Ginsberg

I’ll tell you / what I was meant to be— / a device that listened. — Louise Glück

When I’m quiet, that’s when the truth emerges. — Louise Glück

All I have to do after I have the vision is to find the language of music to describe what I have heard, which can take a certain amount of time. I’ve been working in the language of music all my life, and it’s within that language that I’ve learned how ideas can unfold. — Phillip Glass

The word “cancer” follows me. It is the scariest word / in the language, scarier somehow than even “death.” I am being / murdered by my own body. The sparrows go on chirping their / simple three-note song as if there is no extra time for complexity. — Howie Good

now i can’t believe— / that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom / used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”— / all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as: / life is merely / to ovum and sperm / and where those two meet / and how often and how well / and what dies there. — Renée Nicole Good

Winnowed, we are—the wind / in widdershins spin; the clock hiding / its souvenirs in a blue wound. — Jessica Goodfellow

Every landscape turns inside out / as we journey through. Shadows stretch but the stars / keep swallowing us. — Brent Goodman

a filigree of illusion against light / that like crab in sand disappears / into the dark heart of nowhere. — Uma Gowrishankar

Hollowing the walls that make my home, I build a scaffold to hold an empty space. Bricks crumble when intimacy pours through the hole like loosened cement. It’s time to leave the building that exists only in my heart and nowhere else. — Uma Gowrishankar

If gold coins are anathema for an ascetic, what about words / that like lust tangle thoughts? — Uma Gowrishankar

the darkness of the tree line broken / only by my brother, who runs to me / with a look of great hope / carrying the tiny blind unicorn / we, together, are meant to save — Andrew Grace

Nature is making and / Unmaking itself at once — Jason Gray

I’m just like all the rest. I’m in the WORLD THAT IS. — Spalding Gray

Trace my gender / back to its oldest root & you will find my father’s footprint / on my chest, sinking all the way down to my blood. — Torrin A. Greathouse

Particular / and luminous, things tilt / into vision. — Samuel Green

There was the voice in your head the first time / we came / I will die here / like a benediction, light as the first leaf / fall, and you unafraid. — Samuel Green

We have only / the compass of how we walk here / how our feet move / over the soil that will feed us. — Samuel Green

What you thought was a rock / moves, and you think other. / Whatever you focus on becomes / something else, moves away / from its joining. — Samuel Green

You begin by not knowing / where you are, by just / standing and looking for landmarks. — Samuel Green

Fish! Fish! White sun! Tell me we are one / and that it’s the others who scare me, / not you. — Linda Gregg

An illness weakens a handshake; an illness within a handshake; the handshake equals water. November will end soon, I don’t know who I’ll be in December, maybe afraid. — Dan Gutstein

Let me tell you: / God doesn’t give / you any favors / He doesn’t say / now you’ve seen / this bad thing / but tomorrow / you’ll see this good thing / and when you see it / you’ll be smiling — John Guzlowski

Tomorrow / I will be walking in the dawn / and smiling at the closeness / of my honey, the sky. — John Guzlowski

Words appear and I don’t question / why they are there. — John Guzlowski

You come back to the barn / where it all started / where God told you / not to eat the apple / and you find more apples. / And God comes in / And says what are you doing here? / I told you not to come. / And you say I’m just back. — John Guzlowski

Nassir Ghaemi, from His 2017 Letter to a Medical Student

For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

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As for you, look into your soul. Don’t be shy. Be honest. Be brutal. — Nassir Ghaemi

Awards and rewards aren’t given for great achievements, as society claims, but for small ones. — Nassir Ghaemi

Find your solace inside yourself, not outside. — Nassir Ghaemi

Freud never won a Nobel prize; they gave it to the fellow who introduced frontal lobotomy. — Nassir Ghaemi

It’s an unjust world. How will you live in it? — Nassir Ghaemi

Our ideals are mouthed and empty. — Nassir Ghaemi

Psychiatry is plagued deeply by its self-deception. — Nassir Ghaemi

Society punishes those who improve it. — Nassir Ghaemi

The DSM was and is a social construction, as I said, created by the profession for its own social purposes. — Nassir Ghaemi

There are no DSMs as diagnostic straightjackets in any medical specialty except psychiatry. — Nassir Ghaemi

When we make up our phenotypes for social, economic, and professional purposes why should genetics, biology, neuroimaging, pharmacology, and even psychotherapies correlate with it? — Nassir Ghaemi

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Source: Dr. Nassir Ghaemi’s letter to a medical student who is considering entering the field of psychiatry.

Halinen-Huth

For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

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Henceforth, may your heart be three trinities of birdcall and birdsong and caw. — Jeremy Halinen

Grief makes one family / of us all. — Sam Hamill

If you love poetry, you are charged with finding poetry that helps you change your life. — Sam Hamill

In that insight of inter-being, it is possible to have real communication with the Earth, which is the highest form of prayer. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Nothing can be by itself alone, no one can be by himself or herself alone, everyone has to inter-be with every one else. That is why, when you look outside, around you, you can see yourself. — Thich Nhat Hanh

This body is not me. / I am not limited by this body. / I am life without boundaries. / I have never been born, / and I have never died. Look at the ocean and the sky filled with stars, / manifestations from my wondrous true mind. Since before time, I have been free. / Birth and death are only doors through which we pass, / sacred thresholds on our journey. / Birth and death are a game of hide-and-seek. So laugh with me, / hold my hand, / let us say good-bye, / say good-bye, to meet again soon.We meet today. / We will meet again tomorrow. / We will meet at the source every moment. / We meet each other in all forms of life. — Thich Nhat Hanh

Writing shit about new snow
for the rich
is not art.

— Kobayashi Issa, trs. Robert Hass

Girl sprawled on a couch, a girl on a horse, girl in a mirror. / The orchid’s tender stem in a hipped-shaped vase. / How long before the vessel breaks? — Terrance Hayes

This torso is a hard seed, / this mouth a lodestar guttered. / The greater sky above this one is the dream / we ever wake from, and remember — Rebecca Hazelton

I write by hand (first draft) / because it’s harder to lie / dissemble or distract / when my body’s involved — Mark Hein

Each moment stands under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information, potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly incomplete. — Lyn Hejinian

It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient. — Ernest Hemingway

Write hard and clear about what hurts. — Ernest Hemingway

I’ve, I’ve got a bone / to pick and a crow to pluck. / I’ve got my tail tucked, wound / to lick. I prefer not to talk. / I said, I prefer not to talk. — Andrea Henchey

How can I make it beautiful? That’s always my goal. — Sara Henning

Nights I give myself / to memory’s epithet, your chin hard / on my clavicle, your hands / pinioning my wrists to the pillow / as though they were nectar- / containing spurs of delphinium — Sara Henning

tell me the story / of the body we carry with us. — Sara Henning

Which of us stays at her guttural refrain for days, though our love was never so close to our hunger? What is love but a set of urges? Hold the nape of the neck just so—carry the pieces of the body just so— — Sara Henning

The noisy rooks pass over, and you may / Pace undiverted through the netted light / As silent as a thrush with work to do — John Hewitt

This is where we are at right now, as a whole. No one is left out of the loop. We are experiencing a reality based on a thin veneer of lies and illusions. A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart. — Bill Hicks

Don’t try to sell anything door-to-door would be my advice, particularly your poems. — Bob Hicok

You never really know / if you’ve done any good with your life, / so why not act as confused / as everyone else — Bob Hicok

My mother’s smile a swing-bridge / to an island city, her voice a parachute / that possessed everything it is possible to know. — Alan Hill

I remember that eight-year-old boy / who had tasted the sweetness of air, / which still clings to my mouth / and disappears when I breathe. — Edward Hirsch

And within my body, / another body … sings; there is no other body, / it sings, / there is no other world — Jane Hirshfield

I don’t want to scream forever, / I don’t want to live without proportion / like some kind of infection from the past — Tony Hoagland

Let it keep falling / Until maybe it lands in the basin of the hips / Let the Earth hold it / Like a giant seed / That’s been waiting to find the soil — Thomas Holmes

Throw out the Cartesian dualism and bio-reductionism AND psychological reductionism. Our minds are embodied, emotive, enacted, socially embedded, and extended through tools, physical and symbolic. No good mental health treatment neglects any of these aspects. — Thomas Holmes

First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. There is a great heap of dead men’s bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them. — Homer

But the newborn rabbits— / no, they were not so lucky. They didn’t live / for forty years like the crane does. They saw only / grass and a few flowers, maybe the sky / and a black vine moving quickly, a dark mouth. — Patricia Hooper

It is fascinating to see into other minds, especially across culture. It has given me the impression that experience and perception are much more commonly shared than doctrines of cultural difference often suggest.  — Paul Hoover

Resurrect my day and night, the fire of each star. — Kate Houck

I always felt like reading a poem was an experience analogous to that of encountering language. Sure, there’s persona, and the world of the poem, and voice etc etc etc. But it’s all made out of language, and the language is the first thing I am made aware of. — Lisa Howe

What happened in our house taught my brothers how to leave, how to walk / down a sidewalk without looking back. / I was the girl. What happened taught me to follow him, whoever he was, / calling and calling his name. — Marie Howe

Truth is / we have been long upon the trail / of this disaster, this smile of stove in boats / and grit along the shore. Does everyone / come home at last / to ruin? — Christopher Howell

At night / deer drift from the dark woods and eat my garden. / They’re like enormous rats on stilts except, / of course, they’re beautiful. — Andrew Hudgins

A hunger catches in our throats. Desire hikes up. / The night swims, fluoresces. This cannot be cured. — Amorak Huey

Saving superpowers for the last act / is such a classic mistake. My body has no plans & no prototype, / though I still expect to rush in & rescue myself. — Amorak Huey

I caution against communication because once language exist only to convey information, it is dying. In news articles the relation of the words to the subject is a strong one. The relation of the words to the writer is weak. (Since the majority of your reading has been newspapers, you are used to seeing language function this way). When you write a poem these relations must reverse themselves: The relation of the word to the subject must weaken—the relation of the words to the writer (you) must take on strength. — Richard Hugo

In a poem you make something up, say for example a town, but an imagined town is at least as real as an actual town. If it isn’t you may be in the wrong business. — Richard Hugo

Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. — Richard Hugo

in less than a small / touch I crumple down, and the tea / I am holding is immersed in the / puddles, and my body turns / the waters fragrant. — Tung-Hui Hu

Most days are crushed / breathless by something far away, / too beautiful, true in a fiery / and glorious way. — Tom C Hunley

What killed this man? / The chorus answered, Bare, bare fat. — Zora Neale Hurston

By this pond-sheened curve of trees and sunset/cloud, I hush. I let quietude creep closer, a wild thing nosing / at my heart — Alison Hurwitz

I want to say that / home’s the place you are: a branch, a rubber tire, abandoned cedar shingles, / bones. We’re those that always find a substrate we can cling to. — Alison Hurwitz

This is what poetry is now: the presentation of self, the presentation of words (and of images [and of images of words]), links to other content, self-promotion, and the integration of poetry into the entirety of one’s personal (and sometimes also professional) life. All of this is good and all of it is dangerous. — Geof Huth

This is what a black bear sounds like. A low deep moan, like I have disappointed him yet again. The yard is littered with sticks. A winter’s harvest collected one at a time. How we count the days. I am running out of hunger. Why do we cry? What does it mean to lose a person when we are all temporary anyway? It is an irrational reality, how beautiful a hewn beam is. How one thing can become another. — Leo Hwang

Julia Hartwig, from ‘In Praise of the Unfinished’

For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

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And the absurd hope awakens that everything / scattered chaotically in the world will settle down / again, in natural order. — from “Fortune-Telling from the Seabed”

But the one who reads your poems / doesn’t care how much you paid for them — from “Before”

But there were years no one counted / royal years / when we played under ancient oaks / and eternity was with us — from “Nontime”

consider the rivers and mountains / They remember more than people / their memory is more faithful and deeply hidden — from “My Greetings to a Distant River”

It is better to be careful, however, judging the happiness of others. — from “Not to Be Certain”

Perhaps nothing in the world / is used with such wastefulness / or such stinginess / as time — from “Not Eternity and Not a Void”

The old man does not threaten anyone with his / own death, doesn’t share his despair with anyone, / and doesn’t complain that for him everything was at / first too early, then too late. — from “The Old Man”

To understand nothing. Each time in a different / way, from the first cry to the last breath. / Yet happy moments come to me from the past, like / bridesmaids carrying oil lamps. — from “Return to My Childhood Home”

What in this asphalt suburb / could bring forth such joy / such exaltation of prayer when it is still dark / and not a single streak of light in the sky — from “Before Dawn”

who will reject us with relief / freeing us from the ties of art / which constantly demands something / asks questions / scorns an easy victory — from “Questions”

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Source: In Praise of the Unfinished, by Julia Hartwig.