A Poet Reflects

“The poet sees what the philosopher thinks.”

—Charles Simic, from section II of The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks (Copper Canyon Press, 2008)

oldmanflower:

“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.”

—Allen Ginsberg

(Source: outofprintclothing)

litverve:

“I’m not a poet. I’m a person far out at sea, and the poem is a raft made of whatever floats past in the water. Those almost accidental rescuing pieces are words, rhythms, musics, ideas, the memory that is mine and the memory that is all of ours and the memory that is held in language itself.”

—Jane Hirshfield, in an interview with Kim Rosen 

(Source: weissewiese)

hypocrite-lecteur:

“A poet
is a gardener
of silence.”

—Boris A. Novak, from “The Gardener of Silence”

“The poet … like the lover … is a person unable to reconcile what he [or she] knows with what he [or she] feels.  His [or Her] peculiarity is that he [or she] is under a certain compulsion to do so.”

—Babette Deutsch, from “Poetry at Mid-Century” in The Writer’s Book, edited by Helen Hull (Harper & Brothers, 1950)

The poet calls it a day and leaves the ink to dry like blood.

—Paul Guest, last line to “Invocation to the Destructive Muses” from The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World (New Issue, 2003)

A poem is read by the poet, who then becomes
That poem himself
For a little while,
                         caught in its glistening tentacles.
The waters of deep remembering
Wash over him, clouds build up
As do the shadowy pools
                                     under the evergreens.
Later, the winds of forgetfulness
Blow in from a thousand miles away
And the poet starts to write.
This is the way the day moves,
                                             and the sparks from its wheels.

—Charles Wright, from “Buffalo Yoga” in Buffalo Yoga (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004)

“A poet must discover that it’s his [or her] own story that is true, even if the truth is small indeed.” 

—Jim Harrison

badwolfcomplex:

“W.H. Auden was once asked what advice he would give a young man who wished to become a poet. Auden replied that he would ask the young man why he wanted to write poetry. If the answer was ‘because I have something important to say,’ Auden would conclude that there was no hope for that young man as a poet. If on the other hand the answer was something like ‘because I like to hang around words and overhear them talking to one another,’ then that young man was at least interested in a fundamental part of the poetic process and there was hope for him.”

—John Ciardi, with Miller Williams, from Does a Poem Mean? (Houghton Mifflin, 1975)