Great Throughts Treasury

"A great many people seem to think writing poetry is worthwhile, even though it pays next to nothing and is not as widely read as it should be."

"A life is not sufficiently elevated for poetry, unless, of course, the life has been made into an art."

"And Robert Lowell, of course - in his poems, we're not located in his actual life. We're located more in the externals, in the journalistic facts of his life."

"And into the close and mirrored catacombs of sleep we'll fall, and there in the faded light discover the bones, the dust, the bitter remains of someone who might have been had we not taken his place."

"And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written."

"Anywhere Could Be Somewhere: I might have come from the high country, or maybe the low country, I don?t recall which. I might have come from the city, but what city in what country is beyond me. I might have come from the outskirts of a city from which others have come or maybe a city from which only I have come. Who?s to know? Who?s to decide if it rained or the sun was out? Who?s to remember? They say things are happening at the border, but nobody knows which border. They talk of a hotel there, where it doesn?t matter if you forgot your suitcase, another will be waiting, big enough, and just for you."

"And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem."

"And what does it matter when light enters the room where a child sleeps and the waking mother, opening her eyes, wishes more than anything to be unwakened by what she cannot name?"

"A poem is a place where the conditions of beyondness and withinness are made palpable, where to imagine is to feel what it is to be. It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, poetry permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves."

"And yet Nothing here is certain."

"Breath: When you see them tell them I am still here, that I stand on one leg while the other one dreams, that this is the only way, that the lies I tell them are different from the lies I tell myself, that by being both here and beyond I am becoming a horizon, that as the sun rises and sets I know my place, that breath is what saves me, that even the forced syllables of decline are breath, that if the body is a coffin it is also a closet of breath, that breath is a mirror clouded by words, that breath is all that survives the cry for help as it enters the stranger's ear and stays long after the world is gone, that breath is the beginning again, that from it all resistance falls away, as meaning falls away from life, or darkness fall from light, that breath is what I give them when I send my love."

"But I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving."

"Coming To This: We have done what we wanted. We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry of each other, and we have welcomed grief and called ruin the impossible habit to break. And now we are here. The dinner is ready and we cannot eat. The meat sits in the white lake of its dish. The wine waits. Coming to this has its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away. We have no heart or saving grace, no place to go, no reason to remain."

"Each moment is a place you?ve never been."

"Eating Poetry: Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry. The librarian does not believe what she sees. Her eyes are sad and she walks with her hands in her dress. The poems are gone. The light is dim. The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up. Their eyeballs roll, their blond legs burn like brush. The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep. She does not understand. When I get on my knees and lick her hand, she screams. I am a new man, I snarl at her and bark, I romp with joy in the bookish dark."

"From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose."

"From the shadow of domes in the city of domes, a snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room and made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up from your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's all there was to it."

"How can I sing? Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same. I empty myself of my life and my life remains."

"How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past?"

"For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better."

"Even this late it happens the coming of love, the coming of light. You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves, stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows, sending up warm bouquets of air. Even this late the bones of the body shine and tomorrow?s dust flares into breath."

"I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes."

"I am always thinking in the back of my mind, there?s something always going on back there. I am always working, even if it?s sort of unconsciously, even though I?m carrying on conversations with people and doing other things, somewhere in the back of my mind I?m writing, mulling over. And another part of my mind is reviewing what I?ve done."

"I am not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful."

"I don't really think it will make much difference to me when I'm dead whether I'm read or not? just as whether I'm dead or not won't mean much to me when I'm dead."

"I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream."

"I feel that anything is possible in a poem."

"I haven?t met God and I haven?t been to heaven, so I?m skeptical."

"I grow into my death. My life is small and getting smaller. The world is green. Nothing is all."

"I have been eating poetry."

"I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me."

"I think the best American poetry is the poetry that utilizes the resources of poetry rather than exploits the defects or triumphs of the poet's personality."

"I is for immortality, which for some poets is a necessary compensation. Presumably miserable in this life, they will be remembered when the rest of us are long forgotten. None of them asks about the quality of that remembrance--what it will be like to crouch in the dim hallways of somebody's mind until the moment of recollection occurs, or to be lifted off suddenly and forever into the pastures of obscurity. Most poets know better than to concern themselves with such things. They know the chances are better than good that their poems will die when they do and never be heard of again, that they'll be replaced by poems sporting a new look in a language more current. They also know that even if individual poems die, though in some cases slowly, poetry will continue: that its subjects, it constant themes, are less liable to change than fashions in language, and that this is where an alternate, less lustrous immortality might be. We all know that a poem can influence other poems, remain alive in them, just as previous poems are alive in it. Could we not say, therefore, that individual poems succeed most by encouraging revisions of themselves and inducing their own erasure? Yes, but is this immortality, or simply a purposeful way of being dead?"

"I tend to think of the expressive part of me as rather tedious - never curious or responsive, but blind and self-serving."

"If every head of state and every government official spent an hour a day reading poetry we'd live in a much more humane and decent world."

"I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony."

"In a field I am the absence of field. That is always the case. Wherever I am, I am what is missing. When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the space where my body has been. We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole."

"Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry. The librarian does not believe what she sees. Her eyes are sad and she walks with her hands in her dress. The poems are gone. The light is dim. The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up. Their eyeballs roll, their blond legs burn like brush. The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep. She does not understand. When I get on my knees and lick her hand, she screams. I am a new man. I snarl at her and bark. I romp with joy in the bookish dark."

"In another time, What cannot be seen will define us, and we shall be prompted To say that language is error, and all things are wronged By representation. The self, we shall say, can never be Seen with a disguise, and never be seen without one."

"It hardly seems worthwhile to point out the shortsightedness of those practitioners who would have us believe that the form of the poem is merely its shape."

"It came to my house. It sat on my shoulders. Your shadow is yours. I told it so. I said it was yours. I have carried it with me too long. I give it back."

"Life makes writing poetry necessary to prove I really was paying attention."

"Keeping Things Whole: In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing. When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body's been. We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole."

"It's very hard to write humor."

"Lines for Winter: Tell yourself as it gets cold and gray falls from the air that you will go on walking, hearing the same tune no matter where you find yourself? inside the dome of dark or under the cracking white of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow. Tonight as it gets cold tell yourself what you know which is nothing but the tune your bones play as you keep going. And you will be able for once to lie down under the small fire of winter stars. And if it happens that you cannot go on or turn back and you find yourself where you will be at the end, tell yourself in that final flowing of cold through your limbs that you love what you are."

"Lines For Winter: I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets. I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road. At night I turn back the clocks; I open the family album and look at myself as a boy. What good does it do? The hours have done their job. I say my own name. I say goodbye. The words follow each other downwind. I love my wife but send her away. My parents rise out of their thrones into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing? Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same. I empty myself of my life and my life remains."

"No voice comes from outer space, from the folds of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew how long the ruins would last we would never complain."

"Maybe people avoid poetry because it somehow actively makes them nervous or anxious."

"My Name: Once when the lawn was a golden green and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass, feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered what I would become and where I would find myself, and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard my name as if for the first time, heard it the way one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off as though it belonged not to me but to the silence from which it had come and to which it would go."

"Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our time is becoming the architecture of the next time. And the dazzle of light upon the waters is as nothing beside the changes wrought therein, just as our waywardness means nothing against the steady pull of things over the edge. Nobody can stop the flow, but nobody can start it either. Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems, and what is invisible stays that way. Desire has fled, leaving only a trace of perfume in its wake, and so many people we loved have gone, and no voice comes from outer space, from the folds of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew how long the ruins would last we would never complain."