As & When

“I don’t think I could write poetry without an image. It’s what we see, and what we are willing to become.”

“It’s no crime to be ignorant. We’re all ignorant of a great many things. Myself included. I’m ignorant of things like American football, folklore in Borneo...”

Selected quotes from Poets Forum, 10/10/15

“You look into the past, you look into the future, to the slime-moulds that will inherit the earth. What will their poetry be?”

Anne Waldman

“It’s diversity that is the fuel for innovation.”

Toi Derricotte

“A sonnet now is something that has a whiff of fourteen about it.”

Linda Gregerson

“I am already waist deep in what you call the ‘muddy’ before I realize I am writing a book.”

Alicia Ostriker

“You don’t need all of the words. You need the right ones. And they needn’t be very many.”

Alberto Rios

“When I am writing, I’m not looking at the event, but at the history.”

Claudia Rankine

“We have to become a collective voice, and a big voice. Or we’ll all become little patterns.”

Quotes from the Chancellors’ of the Academy of American Poets Reading.

“I’ve been writing autobiographical things all my life. Recently I’ve been thinking, why have I done that? It’s just no fun.”

Toi Derricotte

“Theology is bunk, but the springtime wind is real.”

Alicia Ostriker

“The border is a real crack in an imaginary dam.”

Alberto Rios

*rustling a book* “This poem is called: book sounds.”

"You have to have your character on the verge of a nervous breakdown or you have no book."

"We cannot bear to have our depths unmonstered." 

"I was wearing a Hamlet... helmet! Sorry, that was a Freudian slip. Like the whole of this play." 

Overheard at New York Public Library.