poetry
Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air, a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody’s head off.
Lit (New York: Harper, 2009), 59.
If Emily Dickinson owned a restaurant it would be Chez Panisse.
Eating: A Memoir (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 132.
I find quotes everywhere. In books of course, but also in less likely places like dedications, speeches, ads or even words jotted down on the back of an envelope, like this one from Emily Dickinson: “In this short life that only lasts an hour, / How much—how little—is within our power.”
“Diane Keaton: By the Book,” The New York Times, May 1, 2014.
Stet is my slogan.
Letter to Louis Untermeyer, September 6, 1938, in The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 311.
He could read the phonebook and make it sound terrific.
Describing Dylan Thomas in “A Useful Poetry,” interview by Wen Stephenson, The Atlantic, April 8, 1999.
If you work on something a little bit every day, you end up with something that is massive.
“Proudly Fraudulent: An Interview with MoMA’s First Poet Laureate, Kenneth Goldsmith,” by Mark Allen, The Awl, February 6, 2013.
Year’s end, all
corners of this
floating world, swept.
On Love and Barley: Haiku of Bashō (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), 59.
Once as I looked up I saw a big, pure drop of rain slip from leaf to leaf of a clematis vine. The thought occurred to me that it was just such quick, unexpected, commonplace, specific things that poets and other observers jot down in their note-books.
Journal entry dated July 18, 1899, in The Letters of Wallace Stevens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 29.
For the first time in my life I see that I have grown an inch and I believe that I may in ten years be a poet. It is wonderful.
January 15, 1939 letter to Virginia Woolf, in May Sarton: Selected Letters 1916–1954 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 150.
Please—take care of your health! Being a poet is one of the unhealthier jobs—no regular hours—so many temptations!
Letter to Robert Lowell, August 26, 1963, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 495.
Let it all begin once more, the step-by-step joyful effort to lift a poem out.
The House by the Sea (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 49.
All the way down through the moonlight beside the river I was literally attacked by so many poems that I felt like a juggler, terrified that I couldn’t keep them all going long enough at least to jot down a note. When I arrived, I made a dash for the typewriter, coat still on and typed like automatic writing for half an hour.
Letter to Louise Bogan, in May Sarton: Selected Letters 1955–1995 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), 37.