When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out.
What are men? Children who doubt.
The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .
The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
I read; I travel; I become
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
The thing that is believed is a reality.
We look and see what we see in a mirror, and we believe it. That's important, the question of belief. The question is: Should we believe what we see in a mirror?
For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.
The truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element.
Americans are not brought up with meter. They're not brought up with poetry. If you try to get them to recite, they're too embarrassed.
The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.
The first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.
She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.
In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
Love After Love The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.
The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome.
A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
The poem is itself a mirror.
I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
We read, we travel, we become.
Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.
There's always more to see.
You can't write drunk.
I know when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh, that there'd be no rest, there'd be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside about resurrection, they want the dead back.
Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.
When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
Slowly my body grows a single sound, slowly I become a bell, an oval, disembodied vowel, I grow, an owl, an aureole, white fire poesia "Metamorfosi, I. Luna
The mirror is believed the way a poem is believed. It's believed because it's there.
Love After Love all your life, whom you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style.
I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars.
Who cares about a kid from the Midwest writing pentameter? It's stupid.
The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe. I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.
Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.
I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.
Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.
Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.
How can I turn from Africa and live?
We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.
The English language is nobody's special property.
Time is the metre, memory the only plot.
The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.
To change your language you must change your life.
All of Victorian verse is pentameter.
I look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?
Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
The classics can console. But not enough.
