“This hour I tell things in confidence. I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you. To publish these lines is, of course, to tell everybody. Much as he wants to take us into his confidence, seduce with the warmth and directness of his voice, he's also making one of his sly jokes: he's created an intimacy with all the doors and windows open, in which you could be anyone at all. Even as I laugh at the line, I feel the gesture of his arm around my shoulder, drawing my ear nearer his mouth. What is the difference, in a poem, between performed intimacy and the real thing? What, in a work of art, is not performed? Whitman, perhaps more than any poet before him, explored and exploited poetry's strange duality. In the best poems, we feel the poet's breath, the almost-physical presence of the speaker created by all the tools at the writer's disposal. I sometimes feel that Walt has just walked into the room, as present now as he ever was, a sensual, breathing body that he somehow seems to have constructed of nothing but words.” PoetryPoetPoemIntimacyDualityPerformanceWalt WhitmanWhitman Book:What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life Source: What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life
“Where on earth did it come from? You can ask that question of any poem, and one inevitable answer is a simple one: work. No made thing springs up unbidden, even those that seem to. The poem that announced itself to the intoxicated Coleridge, before a knock at the door banished most of it from his memory, or the composition that sprung full blown into the head of Mozart, as he stepped down from a carriage after a satisfying dinner, seemed to pour from the artist's hand, so long schooled those hands had become. But years of labor inform those spontaneous productions. Though a poem over which one struggles may seem labored, it often prepares the way for new writing in which what's been learned emerges with an effortless grace.” WritingInspirationPoetryArtistPoetPoemAuthorOn Writing Book:What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life Source: What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life
“Poetry exists to find words for what resists easy naming; we are most often driven to write it or read it when any other sort of language seems incapable of the work required.” PoetryPoetPoemPoems Author:Mark Doty
“What does being on earth ask of us? The world wants to be rescued from evanescence, to be translated into an immaterial realm that does not perish because it was never exactly alive. To become, in other words, poetry--either in the poem the poet writes out of engagement with things, or in the interior "poem" of anyone who loves the world, the never-said words we come, over time, to carry within us.” LifePoetryPoetPoem Book:What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life Source: What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life
“Into the paradise of euphony, the good poet must introduce hell. Broken paradises are the only kind worth reading.” KindReadingHellPoetBrokenParadiseIntroducingWorth Reading Author:Mark Doty
