Tate-Tulee

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 calm that returned to us / was not even our own. — James Tate

Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody. — James Tate

I fall and fuck around about, / clumsy, confused and cracked. — Glen Martin Taylor

It’s a bit of last chance alchemy, / to take the kitchen floor suffering, / and turn it into art, screaming art, / to turn a winter’s silence into a song, / to find a sunrise in the last darkness / it’s a bit alchemy, it’s a bit of hope. — Glen Martin Taylor

My work is therapy. My work is autobiographical. So much of my inner life is non-verbal and so it spills out as art. And my work saves me. And so I work. My work is about being broken and mending and healing and being human. I make my work alone, but then someone else sees it and feels it and then I’m no longer alone. It’s easy for me to be an artist. It’s hard somedays to be a person. And so I work. — Glen Martin Taylor

May God break my heart so completely that an entire world falls in. — Mother Teresa

I / ground myself / back into the / body with the / smallest and most / controlled of pains. — Allison Thung

How I wish her here / without a girlfriend shield, / without my brother’s strut / turning her from me forever. — Isaac Timm

When the suffering of another creature causes you to feel pain, do not submit to the initial desire to flee from the suffering one, but on the contrary, come closer, as close as you can to him who suffers, and try to help him. — Leo Tolstoy

rain outside is like god shaking fine / sugar on a cake — Louise Tondeur

By now you’re surely understanding that writing is not my primary work, but an urgency, perhaps an affliction—a consequence of my life. — Stephan Torre

I was given / a wild place to be. Sometimes / it hurt to move out there / as evening rippled, and no voice / came back from the animals. — Stephan Torre

it is love that draws me again / and again from the word emptiness — Stephan Torre

Poems, certainly lyric poems but even most narrative poems, come from an ecstatic surplus of joy or grief which one can no longer hold in one’s veins or keep secret. — Stephan Torre

some lives will not root / in geometry / or hold anything / but the coastal / edges / of rivers and tides — Stephan Torre

Spring, and yet all / the world wrinkles / so easy — Stephan Torre

The culture I toss my poems into is fractured, divorced from nature, frightened, and addicted to technology. I’m not sure I have the language, or generative questions, for it. — Stephan Torre

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat / but often the shadow seems more real than the body. — Tomas Tranströmer

What a terrible gift / to learn how to say the hardest things / straight. — Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

like when you’ve sloshed in / wet cement and don’t know it till you see the tracks / on your new carpet, yeah, and then see darker tracks, / from when you set your sock on fire trying to light / a cigarette — William Trowbridge

the tires still sing, / Gone. Over and out, / as we drive off, suckers / for the high roll / of center line and landscape, / shedding cares, / shedding cells, / half-hypnotized / by expectation’s / slippery caress — William Trowbridge

My boundaries are as much in thoughts and behaviors as in geography and geological features. My maps are drawn up by culture, custom, tribe, family, and myself. — Arthur Tulee

Every language has a problem because it doesn’t have a tense to use for the dead. — Brian Turner

The name that can be named / is not the universal name. — Lao Tzu

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. — Mark Twain

I want to be a faint pencil line / under the important words, / the ones that tell the truth. — Chase Twichell

Stephan Torre, from ‘Iron Fever’

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 it’s okay that no one is left / and no one will be there, around the next switchback / as the windshield is smoking blue. — from “Buck Road”

it is love that draws me again / and again from the word emptiness — from “Practice”

jumping / jesus this is some kind of mutha / fucking fun. — from “I/ Excavation”

Not easy to step away / from the sink by an open window / or the plums darkening beneath / cracked rafters of the tool shed, / to stroll without singing / through the first veins of April, / no need to return. — from “After Juarroz”

Now only the tree beside him has / a shape; and he doesn’t reach for it. Dusk breathes out of / the dogwood, and the odor of horses drifts around him. A gentle and enormous sweetness rising, with no body at all, / out of the dark pasture. — from “Walking Barb Wire”

some lives will not root / in geometry / or hold anything / but the coastal / edges / of rivers and tides — from “Windshake”

This light on your wrist / is always ample and exquisite / for the certain feast you have / dug for and deserved. — from “Under the Badger’s Nose, Late January”

You were always good at dreaming yourself / into abandoned places. — from “Buck Road”

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Source: Iron Fever, by Stephan Torre.

Uschuk

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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Do these refugees remind you, too, of migrant winter birds / tourists drive thousands of miles to see, writing down / in moleskine waterproof notebooks wing shape, / breast color as they click on an app to identify / each nuance of song they meant / to actually hear? — Pam Uschuk

Valéry-Vuong

For more than a decade, I’ve maintained aFor 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. 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.

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There is in you what is beyond you. — Paul Valéry

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I think about all the women who want you more than me. / I think about yanking the necklaces from the girls’ throats, / unconcerned whether I break the clasps or the girl. — Shelby Vane

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How we live like water: touching / a new tongue with no telling / what we’ve been through. — Ocean Vuong

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I want to take care of our planet because I need a beautiful graveyard. — Ocean Vuong

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Say autumn despite the green / in your eyes. Beauty despite / daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn / mounting in your throat. / My thrashing beneath you / like a sparrow stunned / with falling. — Ocean Vuong

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To even write the word father / is to carve a portion of the day / out of a bomb-bright page. — Ocean Vuong

Wainwright-Wunderlich

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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‎I am increasingly in love with the idea of love flowing from each of us according to our abilities, and to each of us according to our needs. — Colleen Wainwright

People love to make a great noise about the importance of hewing to your path. There is a fair amount of literature out there on the noble struggle involved. But rarely do we get into the gruesome details of how doing your own thing will make you feel on a day-to-day basis. Like crazy, for starters. — Colleen Wainwright

… when [Jim] Wilson slows people down, it gives you a chance to watch them moving through space. — Tom Waits

As boys / we knew the difference / between light and dark / We gutted light / skinned it / left the guts at the edge / of the woods — Michael Wasson

Some crumpled carton of cigarettes / a bottle of black death in your hand. / Hold onto me like that. / Like you want to get drunk, stare at the sky — Michael Wasson

In unity of the Holy Spirit / All honour and glory is yours / Almighty Father / Forever and ever / Amazing grace / How sweet the love / That tell me / Nah, I’m just kidding, here’s a song / Here we go, this is it / This is it, though / For real — Reggie Watts

Our dreams are an absence / of fire. They take us / all the way to heaven, / by a curious path. / They take us / all the way to hell. — Jeff Weddle

There are more dead poets
in this world
              than living police officers
and that’s fine,
                      but some poets are still alive
even breathing
                           and some stay alive
           in the ground.
I want to claim hope and there it is.

— Jeff Weddle

it took me years / to reach / this age — John Weeren

Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside. — T. H. White

We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. ― Elie Wiesel

But I had to leave the carnival / of vulvas to meet my bicurious / art major girlfriend who barely / touched me. — Ren Wilding

My chest is a stranger / I don’t want to know. / Hills mudslide into my armpits. / I can’t reach my arm far enough / across my body. I can only touch / where my heart is. — Ren Wilding

You won’t speak to me if I love / anyone else, leaving me / with cochineals blighting / my chest. I can’t hold enough / water for us both to survive. — Ren Wilding

Our kinship with Earth must be maintained; otherwise, we will find ourselves trapped in the center of our own paved-over souls with no way out. ― Terry Tempest Williams

as each of us wants the other / watching at the end, / as both want not to leave the other alone, / as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone, / we gaze across breakfast and pretend. — Miller Williams

At our age the imagination / across the sorry facts / lifts us / to make roses / stand before thorns. — William Carlos Williams

The body is a formal constraint. It has this one life with which to make eternity. — Elizabeth Willis

Our kinship with Earth must be maintained; otherwise, we will find ourselves trapped in the center of our own paved-over souls with no way out. ― Terry Tempest Williams

Turns out soil is a good audience. — Ella Wilson

Craziness in the air seldom comes / to such barren places. — Thomas Zvi Wilson

Everyone waits for mud to freeze, for cold / that tears flesh like teeth do, the sky / darkened as if by shame and on the ground / the white sheet of surrender. — Thomas Zvi Wilson

“Some buildings loiter, loiter — / and that is why I have seen suddenly everyone is a rat.” Craziness in the air seldom comes / to such barren places. — Thomas Zvi Wilson

The river quickly divides what spoils / then eats away at last / the last of everything that was — Thomas Zvi Wilson

Watch over me. / Night is here / and I am naked. — Thomas Zvi Wilson

Construct an instrument, or find something, or use an instrument as part of a construction which can make 5 different pitches, or 11 or 3 different pitches; 6 different qualities of sound (they can be made to depend on the manner of performance), or 2; and which can sustain sounds at least somewhat before they begin to fade. — Christian Wolff

Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights. — Virginia Woolf

I like to come and go through different doors more than I like to throw my weight against the same one every time only to discover it was never locked; and I like to change the locks once in a while too; but it isn’t just about keeping it interesting for the Author or Dear Reader; it is about how differently things actually are if you come and go by different portals. — C.D. Wright

Actually, nights are hard for everybody because it’s dark. — Charles Wright

There it stood again: / wood’s edge, and depression’s / deepening / shade inviting me in / saying / no one is here. / No one was there / to be ashamed of me. — Franz Wright

The cowbells follow one another / Into the distances of the afternoon. — James Wright

Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom. — James Wright

Keep the wars on opposite shores, / spare us from wandering, hungry soldiers / cut loose from all that keeps a man / from doing his worst. — Mark Wunderlich

Charles Wright, from ‘Halflife’

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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All of which is to say, I write poems, I don’t write sermons.

All the well-made, passionless, wooden little poems one sees everywhere nowadays, panting like tongues in the books and magazines. But poetry is not a tongue. Poetry is the dark beast with its mouth open, and you’ve got to walk down that tongue and into the windy mouth. And you’ve got to sing while you walk (33).

“Bar Giamaica, 1959-60” is from a section of The Southern Cross in which each poem—and there are twenty in the section—answers to some technical problem I gave myself. Since technical, these problems are formal by definition, some more exaggerated than others. One poem contains no verbs, for instance, while the following one has a verb in every line. There is a poem that tries to imitate, however shallowly, a musical form, and another that tries to assemble itself as a painting might be composed. There are portraits of the poet with people he could not possibly have been seen with, a poem written entirely in hotel rooms (very difficult for me), a poem that was written at one sitting and without changing one word later (a first for me), a poem that has two endings, one on top of the other, a poem with no reference point, two poems whose major imagery comes from the work of another poet. And so on.

[On Cézanne’s paintings] I think they are even more personally engaged because he is the landscape. And that’s what I would like to become. I would like to become the mental landscape that I write about (103).

I’m a primitive poet, I think. I trust my ear, I trust my instincts because I’m not particularly well-read or learned (86).

If, as Keats has it, Melancholy has her shrine in the temple of Delight, then Experimentation has hers in the temple of Form (121).

[On poetry endings] If you end it on a statement, you’d better have one that looks as though it were squeezed out of the poem, and not just tacked on at the end.

[On his concept of God] It was altered by the same things that formed it. I hold it now like a very delicate object, careful not to drop it (109).

[On Emily Dickinson] She wrote about What Mattered, landscape and eternity, the here and the there, the now and then.

Such a line as has “pippiroo, pippera, pippirum” in it, the evasion of emotion. This is very shaky ground for me (96).

The correct image is always a seed—it contains its own explanation, and defines itself (28).

The Jazz Age is over, the mid-century posturing and frenetics and self-important divisions seem to have passed, or at least settled, and the long, high-energy, self-contained imagistic line’s time has come.

The secret of the universe is Form, even if poems are not the secret of the universe. They’re only clues to the secret of the universe.

Unless you love the music of words, you are merely a pamphleteer (24).

Well, I don’t want to tell a story. That’s why I quote the Chinese student who told Pound years ago that poetry is made up of gists and piths — from one meaningful thing to the next, from one strong image to the next, from one musical moment to the next. That’s how I like to put poems together, rather than an overall narrative story (152).

When I write to myself, l’m writing to the landscape, and the landscape is a personification of the people on the other side. That would be my ideal audience (112).

When the finger of God appears, it’s usually the wrong finger (22).

Charles Wright, from ‘Sestets’

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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If you can’t delight in the everyday, / you have no future here. / And if you can, no future either. — from “Future Tense”

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If you don’t shine you are darkness. / The future is merciless — from “Tomorrow”

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There comes a time in one’s life when one wants time, / a lot of time, with inanimate things. — from “Cowboy Up”

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We live on Orphan Mountain, / each of us, and that’s how it is — from “The Waters of Babylon”

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We won’t meet again. So what? / The rust will remain in the trees, / and pine needles stretch their necks, / Their tiny necks, and sunlight will snore in the limp grass. — “This World Is Not My Home, I’m Only Passing Through”

X

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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If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound that’s below, that the blow made. And they haven’t even begun to pull the knife out, much less pull, heal the wound. They won’t even admit the knife is there. — Malcolm X

Y-Young

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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After all, I don’t need to know how to love / to know I do. — Jeremy Y

A single snowflake with its fractals can become a gun scope with its crosshairs. A fallen tree branch in the road can become a limb of a stranger we’ll never know but have empathy for in a ravaged home or land. … And if we can turn the _____ into the _____, we can turn it back again into something akin to hope and healing. — Sandy Yannone

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. — William Butler Yeats

all that separates the ghost is / the body / the sea / the salt. — Hannah Yerington

But to live against all odds, to walk / through this world instead of crawling because / told to crawl? Yes, a dark and powerful magic. — C. Dale Young

Zamora-Zwinger

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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Before taking a workshop with Afaa Michael Weaver, I didn’t know that when we write about our traumas, our brain reworks the neuroplasticity of that event. Meaning that we have the power to shape how we remember trauma. At the atomic level, poetry has the power to heal us through transgressions. Remembering is a transgression because I do not want to relive the trauma, but shaping it, redrafting it, moves me away from it; I can control it. This process is not much different than cutting a saguaro in the desert because you do not want to scrape needles, to hack at the beautiful cactus, but you must. Shaping a hole, not too small and not too big, moves you away from death; you can drink the green water and live. — Javier Zamora

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Sometimes / I wake and my throat is dry, so I drive to botanical gardens / to search for red fruit clutched to saguaros, the ones at dusk / I threw rocks at for the sake of slashing hunger. / But I never find them here. These bats say speak English only. / Sometimes in my car, that viscous red syrup / clings to my throat, and it’s a tender seed toward my survival — Javier Zamora

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Well, basically sounds are for listening to, and composition is the act of organizing sounds. — Frank Zappa

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The true story of this place / recalls people walking / deserts all their lives and / continuing today, if only / in their dreams. — Ofelia Zepeda

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The right to life for everyone. This is exactly what we are fighting for in Ukraine. Very fiercely, together with our military. This is exactly what these weak invaders want to deprive us of. This is exactly what the whole world must protect. — Volodymyr Zelensky

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Manifest an emotional landscape. Don’t tell the reader your emotion. Beautiful is an abstract word that doesn’t mean shit. — Susan Zwinger