Roethke used to mumble: "Jesus, you don't want to say THAT." And you didn't but you hadn't yet become ruthless
enough to create. You still felt some moral obligation to "reality" and "truth," and of course it wasn't moral
obligation at all but fear of yourself and your inner life.

Poets who fail (and by fail I mean fail themselves and never write a poem as good as they know they are
capable of) are often poets who fail to accept feelings of personal worthlessness. They lack the self-criticism
necessary to perfect the poem. They resist the role of a wrong thing in a right world and proclaim themselves
the right thing in a wrong world.... In a sense they are not honest and lack the impulse (or fight it) to revise
and perfect.

-- Richard Hugo

I came to appreciate how working within formal constraints liberates you and gives depth to your poetry.
It gives wings to your work. Being able to write in a disciplined way using traditional metrical structures can also
enable you to create your own poetic forms, to achieve fluidity because you have a sense of underlying order. 

-- Yehudit Heller

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

-- Adrian Mitchell

Flaubert says somewhere that the life of a poet is a hell of a life, it is a dog’s life, but it is the only one worth living. You suffer more. You are frustrated more by things that don’t bother other people. But you also live so much more. You live so much more intensely and so much more vitally. And with so much more of a sense of meaning, of consequentiality, instead of nothing mattering. This is what is driving our whole civilization into suicide. The feeling that we are living existences in which nothing matters very much, or at all....

For the poet, everything matters, and it matters a lot. That is the realm where we work. Once you are there, you are hooked. If you are a real poet, you are hooked more deeply than any narcotics addict could possibly be on heroin. You are hooked on something that is life-giving instead of destructive. Something that is a process that cannot be too far from the process that created everything.

-- James Dickey (lecture to his last class)

When I gave up writing poetry I was very sad, for I had devoted 15 years to the study
of how the structures of poems carry meaning. But I was delighted to find that nonfiction prose
can also carry meaning in its structures, can tolerate all sorts of figurative language,
as well as alliteration and even rhyme. The range of rhythms in prose is larger and grander
than it is in poetry, and it can handle discursive ideas and plain information
as well as character and story. It can do everything. I felt as though I had switched
from a single reed instrument to a full orchestra.

-- Annie Dillard

Slogging through a first draft is like hoeing a row of corn. You're just happy when you get to the end.
I revise everything 70 times. I love revision. To me that feels like art pulling the thread of your ending
all the way back to the beginning, to work on the grace and fluidity and architecture of a story, that is your real art.

-- Barbara Kingsolver

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12/20/2009 11:36 AM