a collection of quotes compiled by meia geddes

"But I know my first book changed me. I never stopped wanting after that. Not only books, but to be surprised again and again by the possible collusions of language." -Victory Chang, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief

"I remember nodding as if I was fine. I was fine. I had language. And it would be the one thing that would keep returning, like light. Language felt like wanting to drown but being able to experience drowning by standing on a pier." -Victory Chang, Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief

"When I began to listen to poetry, it’s when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to others. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else." —Joy Harjo

"Poets seem to spend a lot of time discussing whether and how various things might be central to poetry. Here though, I want to turn the same question on its head. What if instead we were to consider whether and how poetry is central to various other things?...Now, to many readers, the idea that any diverse array of material could become the material of a poem probably won’t seem all that revolutionary. Of course a person can engage with any subject matter they like. But as I sat with that notion and turned it over in my mind, something suddenly clicked, and I realized that—rather than only questioning whether all poems inherently contain politics or love or death—we could also be asking whether everything that is not already poetry contains poetry. Whether everything is in some sense poetic. What if that were true?" -Mag Gabbert, "Everything is Poetic"

"Pound’s definition of the image was 'that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.'" -A Brief Guide to Imagism

"Why not at least consider the view that there might in fact be unlimited elemental features within poetry, because perhaps every concept and thing on Earth already contains poetry, is latently teeming with poetry?" -Mag Gabbert

"The little magazine had been and remains, at least for a time, the single most efficient path to the deictic claim that says we're here, too.'" -Matvei Yankelevich

"Take the mental condom off." -Danez Smith

"The poetry you write is determined by your state of consciousness, too. Poetry as psychic map, as thumbprint. Poetry as spiritual practice, or poetry as ego fulfillment." -Kim Addonizio

"Wherever one finds oneself, in whatever culture/institution/society, the task is always to wake up to an authentic life, to try and live with grace and compassion and kindness, and to posit something beyond the given, to imagine life as it is not, but could be. To, as Tolstoy said, add your light to the sum of light." -Kim Addonizio

"Love / is paying attention, I remark and you / repeat it to me." -Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

"Trees are the poems that the earth writes upon the sky." -Khalil Gibran

"And I think the world tends to forget that this is the ultimate significance of the body of work each artist produces. That work is not an expression of the desire for praise or recognition, or prizes, but the deepest manifestation of your gratitude for the gift of life." -Stanley Kunitz

"In a poem, the danger is obvious; there is a natural idiom and then there is domesticated language. The difference is apparent immediately when you sense everything has been subjugated, that the poet has tamed the language and the thought process that flows into a poem until it maintains a principle of order but nothing remains to give the poem its tang, its liberty, its force. Once the poem starts flowing, the poet must not try to dictate every syllable." -Stanley Kunitz

"In a poem, the secrets of the poem give it its tension and gift of emerging sense and form, so that it's not always the flowering in the poem and the specific images that make it memorable, but the tensions and physicality, the rhythms, the underlying song. The high spots of a poem could be said to correspond with the bloom in the garden. But you need the compositional entity in order to convey the weight and force of the poem's motion, of its emerging meaning. And you need the silence. So much of the power of a poem is in what it doesn't say as much as in what it does say. As when a flower is preparing to bloom, or after it has bloomed, when it is suspending its strengths and its potency and is at rest—or seems to be, its mission to flower and to produce seed having been fulfilled." -Stanley Kunitz

"In so many instances, the poem is muddied by too much explanation, too much exposure. What one is aiming for is the indication of an energy, or a spirit, below the surface, in the secret vaults of the self, that somehow withers under too much exposition or explanation. That's why I've always believed that so much of the energy of the poem comes from the secrets it folds into what we would call, in a flower, its crown. The height of the beauty of a bloom is its folded state, rather than when it's fully opened. The rose when it is just about ready to unfold is at its most beautiful." -Stanley Kunitz