A Poet Reflects

“Prose—it might be speculated—is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of “communication”; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider’s delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.”

—Joyce Carol Oates

“With poetry, I feel I am in love.  With prose, I feel I am in a marriage.”

—Dunya Mikhail

“To hell with poetry that has no more interest than the mere miserable prose meaning of it.”

—X. J. Kennedy, from The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets, edited by Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall, & David Weiss (W. W. Norton & Company, 1995).

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions.  You change direction but the sandstorm chases you.  You turn again, but the storm adjusts.  Over and over you play this out like some ominous dance with death just before dawn.  Why?  Because this storm isn’t something that has nothing to do with you.  So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step.  There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time.  Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones.  That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.”

—Haruki Marukami, Kafka on the Shore (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005)

   “Prose [and poetry] need to be built like a cathedral.  There one is truly without a name,
   without ambition, without help; on scaffolding, alone with one’s consciousness.”

                                                                                                            —Rainer Maria Rilke