Charles Wright

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

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”