A Poet Reflects

“What I would say is this: Writing poems doesn’t make you a poet … It is only with poetry, for some reason, that everyone wants to believe they can try their hand at it once in a while and be considered, can call themselves a poet … It’s a craft. It’s an art. It’s a skill. It is not therapy, and it is not compensation for terrible things in one’s life. It is a thing in itself. You devote yourself to being an instrument of it, or you wander forever in the belief that it is a form of “self-expression.” … And I explained very clearly my opinion of what I think a poet, an artist is. Someone who puts this thing first.”

—Franz Wright

“No one is a poet unless he [or she] has felt the temptation to destroy language or create another one, unless he [or she] has experienced the fascination of non-meaning and the no less terrifying fascination of meaning that is inexpressible.”

—Octavio Paz, from “Recapitulations” in Alternating Current (Arcade Publishing, 1990)

“From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue.”

—Salvadore Quasimodo

“I’d spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet—buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture—than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.”

—Mary Karr, Lit: A Memoir (Harper, 2009)

“A poet is a world enclosed in a [person].”  —Victor Hugo

While I’m writing, I’m far away;
and when I come back, I’ve gone.

—Pablo Neruda

Worth posting twice …

“The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.” —Jean Cocteau

“The poet judges not as a judge judges but as a sun falling around a helpless thing.”

—Walt Whitman