a collection of quotes compiled by meia geddes

"They are too alive to die, and too dead to live." -Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, on people in the Western world

"So, most days I spend a few hours trying to make something happen in language. I stretch out in bed, or on the couch, and tap away—dreams, rants, what happened yesterday, what's tugging shyly at me or having a tantrum trying to get my attention." —Kim Adonizio

"...I write and it's finally right, the intention rhyming with the result, the marvelous unforeseen surprise of a field flowering with kisses. I write and it's good and I am queen of the kingdom and every flower is for me. I write and it's not good enough; I go and read someone who is very good, and feel inspired, and go back and write again..." -Kim Adonizio

'Here's a mnemonic: Call someone a douche bag and you're using metonymy. Tell him he's an asshole; that's synecdoche." -Kim Addonizio

"A hundred thousand birds salute the day." -Christina Georgina Rossetti

"Every time I write a poem I make a little body." -Oliver Baez Bendorf

"I wouldn't be surprised if poetry — in the sense of a world full of metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns and designs — is how the world works. The world isn't logical. It's a song." -David Byrne

"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