on poetry

“What sets me apart is an excitement to edit, detail orientation, being accidentally sudden, an awkward walk and my ability to untremble when it’s time to step up. It is nearly always time to step up.”
Buddy Wakefield
(b. June 4, 1974)

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photo by Katherine Mager
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on poetry

“[Poetry] is neither the art of the embalmer, nor that of the decorator. It does not breed cultured pearls, nor does it deal in semblances and emblems, and it would not be satisfied by any feast of music. Poetry allies itself with beauty — a supreme union — but never uses it as its ultimate goal or sole nourishment. Refusing to divorce art from life, love from perception, it is action, it is passion, it is power, and always the innovation which extend borders.”
Saint-John Perse
(May 31, 1887 – September 20, 1975)

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quote from Saint-John Perse’s acceptance speech at the Nobel Banquet, December 10, 1960

on poetry

“You don’t necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they’re poets. I don’t call myself a poet, because I don’t like the word. I’m a trapeze artist.”
Bob Dylan
(b. May 24, 1941)

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2019 photo by Dave J Hogan

on poetry

“You do have to have a period of being totally indiscriminate before you can form taste.”
Patricia Lockwood
(b. April 27, 1982)

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photo by Jason Kendall
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on poetry

“I write in lines. So the lines find their way on paper whether I overhear two boys insulting each other at the gas station, or see a gull cleaning her feet, or two old men playing dominoes on a hood of a car, or two young women kissing at the fish market. They become lines on receipts, on my hands, on a water bottle, on other people’s poems. Lines collect for years, but once in a while they discover that other lines are sexy and, well, the poems may come from that sort of a relationship. If I am lucky. Which isn’t often. But one has to have faith.”
Ilya Kaminsky
(b. April 18, 1977)

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photo by Suki Dhanda
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on poetry

“I realized pretty early on that there were not only different languages but also different versions of the same language, each with their own music and history and politics: the English I heard in the U.K. and from my father’s family in California, the “proper” Spanish I was taught in school and the vernacular Puerto Rican jokes and songs and sayings I heard from my maternal grandfather. Also, while they were together my parents made it a point to trade languages: my mother would often address me in her accented English and my father in his accented Spanish — they still do. So by the time I was a teenager and started seriously writing poetry I already understood that language was a performance, and that accents and slang and vernacular forms were all somehow central to my experience of family and place and culture, and in that sense the linguistic explorations in my poetry simply reflect that.”
Urayoán Noel
(b. April 12, 1976)

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on poetry

“I write poetry because I can’t disobey the impulse; it would be like blocking a spring that surges up in my throat. For a long time I’ve been the servant of the song that comes, that appears and can’t be buried away. How to seal myself up now?…It no longer matters to me who receives what I submit. What I carry out is, in that respect, greater and deeper than I, I am merely the channel.”
Gabriela Mistral
(April 7, 1889 – January 10, 1957)

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on poetry

“We are all writing about the same things: grief, death, love, sex, desire, dreams, being alive, loneliness, nature, gratitude, pain, mortality, mortality, mortality, and so forth. How do we have answers to those big ticket topics? We don’t. We can only return to them again and again and dig our finger in the wound again. It seems after we surrender to that, there’s a way in which the poems are saying: I am here, I am here. That’s their great gift: we are simply shouting or whispering that we exist, and in doing so someone else might open a book or read a singular poem and think, ‘Oh wow, I exist too.’ Sometimes that is all it is, and sometimes that is exactly enough.”
Ada Limón
(b. March 28, 1976)

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on poetry

“I do see the poet as someone whose role it is to push back against anti-intellectualism, anti-activism, and passivity in general. The purpose of this pushing back is to show that there are always infinite sides to a story, amazing unimagined perspectives on any narrative, and no limit to how weird and wild and unexpected our language and its meanings can get.”
Brenda Shaughnessy
(b. March 21, 1970)

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on poetry

“The arts (painting, poetry, etc.) are not just these. Eating, drinking, walking are also arts; every act is an art.”
César Vallejo
(March 16, 1892 – April 15, 1938)

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