Young Writers

"The work of a young writer . . . is sometimes a therapeutic act. He finds himself obsessed by certain ways of feeling and thinking of which his instinct tells him he must be rid before he can discover his authentic interests and sympathies..."

W. H. Auden

Brenda Hillman

"I wanted to hear just one voice, and heard two--wanted to be just one thing, but I was several."

A Poet's Ambition

"The utmost ambition is to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of, to lodge a few irreducible bits...."

-Robert Frost, in his introduction to King Jasper, a posthumous collection of poems by E.A. Robinson

"Out of our quarrel with ourselves, we make poetry; out of our quarrel with others, we make only rhetoric."
-Yeats

Mark Doty

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I have never seen a touch
so deliberate.

-from "Atlantis"

     "When someone is trying to make something that doesn't exist yet, for which there is no clear template, it's going to look unfamiliar, and it's likely to arrive with struggle, uncertainty, and a quality of raggedness. What makes things feel polished or "finished" is very often their adherence to familiar codes. The new arrives with its edges less charted; it tends less to "click like the lid of a well-made box" than to jangle or vibrate or sigh. Or even to provoke or irritate, as it presents itself with opacity rather than transparency. The new poem seems to say, You don't know, yet what I am."

-from Mark Doty's introduction to Legitimage Dangers: American Poets of the New Century

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... "Why is it that places removed from human habitation bring us so swiftly into ourselves? I walk into this village of durable pines--tall ones for this sand terrain, which seems the very definition of "infertile"--and I am immediately thinking of how abstracted I've been feeling, how far from myself. Not depressed--I have been operating in the world competently enough, though I'm not trying to do much but get by these days--but distracted. Not focused on what I am experiencing, not quite present with myself.
     "The state of mind above which my distraction floats like fog is suddenly perfectly clear, though the right word for it is less immediately available. Grief is too sharp and immediate; maybe it's the high pitch of the vowel sound, or the monosyllabic impact of the word, as quick a)ab as knife or cut.
     "Sadness is too ephemeral, somehow; it sounds like something that comes and goes, a response to an immediate cause which will pass in a little while as another cause arises to generate a different feeling.
     "Mourning isn't bad, but there's something a little archaic about it. I think of widows keening, striking themselves, clutching at handfuls of dust--dark-swathed years, a closeting of self away from the world, turned inward toward an interior dark. This sounds, for one thing, like more of a removal than the late twentieth century will quite permit. Mourning suggests that nothing else can enter into the mourner's attention. It doesn't suggest the weird interpenetration of ongoingness and endings, of this spring's sprouting life and my continuing sorrow.
     "Sorrow, feels right, for now. Sorrow seems large and inhabitable, an interior season whose vaulted sky's a suitable match for the gray and white tumult arched over these headlands. A sorrow is not to be gotten over or moved through in quite the way that sadness is, yet sorrow is also not as frozen and monochromatic, to my mind, as mourning. Sadness exists inside my sorrow, but it's not as large as sorrow's realm; it comes and goes without really touching the overarching whole. This sorrow is capacious; there's room inside it for the everyday, for going about the workaday stuff of life. And for loveliness, for whatever we're to be given by the daily walk.
     "And we are always given something, it seems..."

-from Heaven's Coast, my favorite book.

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     "That boy I was, clutch of school papers in hand, seems unable to take in these events, or rather, all he can do is take them in, all eyes and ears, a kind of recording instrument unable to interpret. Like a lunar vehicle, one of those probes which will be sent out, in a few years, onto the surface of the moon, the sort that thinks nothing, assesses nothing, merely collects. Bits and pieces of perception--neighbors standing and talking, the bits of overheard talk, the police radios fierce with staticky voices like broadcasts from satellites, something in the newspaper the next day, on the TV news? Maybe he hears his parents talking about it, in the kitchen, when he's not supposed to hear? Something about no money, about how hard it is to have a child who's not all right, the pain of a boy with something wrong with him?"

-from Firebird

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It's like watching your mother sleep,
     minutes after you have been conceived,

and her closed eyes say it's all right
     to wake alone...

-from "Harbor Lights"

Jack Spicer

“There’s a big difference between talking as a teacher, which is easy, and talking as a poet, which is heartbreakingly difficult if you want to talk honestly.”

Jack Spicer, in a letter to Robert Duncan, 1955:
“… the best way to get a method for a new description of poetics is to look at the failures and successes of such things in other arts. Color theory for painting gives, I think, the most exact analogy. What we need is a color wheel for sounds.”

I’m not certain of their faces
Or which I kissed or which I didn’t
Or which of them I hadn’t.
-from "Several Years' Love"

“The point is then, if you’re poets—not too many flashbulbs, huh?—you out to figure out what the power system is within your own community. Your enemy is simply something which is going to try to stop you from writing poetry.”
-from Lecture 4: “Poetry and Politics”

Click Here for more about Jack Spicer.

Endings and Apocalypse

"This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper."
-T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Man"

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
-Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice"

"All good things must come to an end."
Proverb

Quotes for Writers Who Want to Read More Quotes

Young Writers

Brenda Hillman

A Poet's Ambition

Mark Doty

Jack Spicer

Endings and Apocalypse