Great Throughts Treasury

"Life is a loaded gun that looks right at you with a yellow eye."

"The mind can be trained to relieve itself on paper."

"The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry."

"It's time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a seat of unremarkable men and women anonymous faces on the street, a hundred thousand unalphabitized things a million forgotten hours."

"I think more people should be reading it but maybe fewer people should be writing it, ... there's an abundance of unreadable poetry out there."

"I try to presume that no one is interested in me."

"Pleasure, of course, is a slippery word... Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's source."

"In a world where cultures and religions are recklessly facing off, Sholeh Wolpé writes careful poems that cast a light on some of what we all hold in common."

"All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means."

"As I'm writing, I'm always reader conscious. I have one reader in mind, someone who is in the room with me, and who I'm talking to, and I want to make sure I don't talk too fast, or too glibly. Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong."

"But tonight, the lion of contentment has placed a warm heavy paw on my chest."

"I was raised in a fairly strict religious family and attended 16 years of Catholic schools. I feel now that my sense of the spiritual is directly connected to my sense of wonder, my ability to be amazed by the fact of my existence in all its vital impermanence AND by the spectacular environment I wake up to every morning. I am guessing that this sense of wonder is what the creator, if there is one, is still feeling."

"I would say it was a fairly happy childhood. But they say he who says that is just better at repressing things."

"I have no work habits whatsoever. I don't write every day, so often it would be zero hours per day. I kind of hold onto a romantic view. People say in order to be a writer you have to write all the time. The poem will come along when it arrives. I try to be on the lookout for creative opportunities, something that might trigger a poem, but I don't sit down in the morning and try to commit an act of literature before lunch."

"For the translator of poetry, there is no activity that brings you into a closer, more intimate contact with language, both the second language and your own language, which translation allows you to experience freshly. Of course, translation is the impossible art which is why it attracts often the best minds, at least those driven by difficulty. The best metaphor I know for translation is from my friend Eamon Grennan, who translated the poems of Leopardi. It's like walking in a clear mountain stream, looking at colorful stones in the water. You find one so gorgeous, you put it in your pocket, take it home and put it on a shelf. In the morning you are surprised that the stone looks so dull and without luster. You have the stone, but you have removed it from the water of its home language so it has lost its luster."

"I stared up at the ebbing quarter moon and the stars scattered like a handful of salt across the faraway sky."

"I could look at you forever and never see the two of us together."

"I think clarity is the real risk in poetry because you are exposed. You're out in the open field. You're actually saying things that are comprehensible, and it's easy to criticize something you can understand."

"I don't think people read poetry because they're interested in the poet. I think they're read poetry because they're interested in themselves."

"I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves, straining in circles of light to find more light until the line of words becomes a trail of crumbs that we follow across a page of fresh snow."

"I was a most impressionable teenager back in the days of Beatnik glory, so I responded fully to Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti's 'Coney Island of the Mind' — still a good title — Gregory Corso and others. I was in Paris for a summer in the early sixties and hung self-consciously around the corners of the scene on the Boul Mich, as they called it. I sat at the same table with Corso and others, and I even hung around with an American girl named Ann Campbell, whom Realities magazine had called 'The Queen of the Beatniks.' (Let's see ... what did that make me??) But mostly I was a Catholic high school boy in the suburbs who fantasized about stealing a car and driving non-stop to Denver. I probably would have done it, but I didn't have access to those special driving pills Neal Cassady had. Plus, there was always a test to study for, or band practice."

"My poetry is suburban, it's domestic, it's middle class, and it's sort of unashamedly that, but I hope there's enough imaginative play in there that it's not simply poems about barbecuing."

"I wrote very difficult poetry and I was really guilty of not knowing what I was talking about."

"It is important for the poet not to be emotional because you cannot see the world clearly with tears in your eyes."

"It seems only yesterday that I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I would shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees. I bleed."

"One of these days I'm-a make me a book out of you."

"The literary world is so full of pretension, and there's such an enormous gap between how seriously poets take themselves and how widely they're ignored by everybody else. So I appointed myself the poet who's gonna feel free to take potshots at the whole enterprise."

"Novelists, playwrights, painters and others may hold in their heads the expectation of fame, but not poets. Having chosen that road, all one can dream of is the jealousy of one's rivals. Celebrity is unexpected and almost unseemly — it forces one to wear a constant look of chagrin, if that is possible. Unless you are Byron, who was the first poet to become a star. At its worst, fame means being known by strangers — enough to bring on waves of paranoia."

"I write one line at a time. I'm a line-maker. I think that's what makes poets different from prose-writers. That's the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we're doing these two things at the same time. When I'm constructing a poem, I'm trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another."

"Poetry in America is no longer a dirty word. While it is still far from the center of the culture, it is moving slowly inward from the margins. I believe more and more people are shedding their outmoded notions of poetry as an exotic hobby — the result of bad teaching and worse public image problems — and coming to the realization that poetry is about their lives. Poetry is about them."

"Pleasure, of course, is a slippery word.... Our pleasures ultimately belong to us, not to the pleasure's source."

"The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry."

"They were mostly kind of pothead poems. [...] I wrote very short poems in those days. I thought writing poetry was like blowing out birthday candles — you had to do it in one breath."

"There's this pet phrase about writing that is bandied around particularly in workshops about "finding your own voice as a poet", which I suppose means that you come out from under the direct influence of other poets and have perhaps found a way to combine those influences so that it appears to be your own voice. But I think you could also put it a different way. You, quote, find your voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is more like you than anyone else on earth, but is not the equivalent to you."

"Wars begin through greed and vanity and are continued through the insanity of nationalism in which the boundaries of a land replace God."

"The underlying theme of Western poetry is mortality. The theme of carpe diem asks us to seize the day because we have only a limited number of them. To see life through the lens of death is to approach the condition of gratitude for the gift (or simply the fact) of our existence. And as Wallace Stevens said, Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers."