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Quote by David Biespiel

“I'm not going to tell people how to write, but we do have a skill set, and the more we put ourselves out into the world as poets, as a sort of poet of the tribe, as representatives of metaphor, and try to claim space for metaphor in the inner life, that's going to be important and be helpful to poetry and bring a tension for poets writing about whatever they choose.”

Quote by David Biespiel

Author

David Biespiel
David Biespiel

David Biespiel is a renowned American contemporary poet, born on February 18, 1964. His poetry is known for its profound humanistic concern and unique artistic style, which has won him a wide audience. more

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“Because so many poets have chosen a political idiom right now in the US and so many poets have assigned value and inherent knowledge to their racial identity and used that as a form of argumentation, I'm thinking now's a good time to buy low for my own poems and write poems that are deeply in the interior and the psyche. There are plenty of people out there working on subjects of political poetry, partisan poetry, all the way through to crossing the threshold of propaganda. I start thinking now's a good time for me to start writing about the myths of my own psyche.”

“A writer's job is not complete without attention to precision. What you're trying to be precise about is your relationship to the observed thing. And "observed thing" could include remembered thing, fantasized thing, fictionalized thing, recorded thing, trans-altered thing. It's the model that's in front of you or in your brain or your memory or whatever. So you're trying to be precise about what it is you're seeing because it's very unlikely that you're going to be able to depict it as it is.”

“My revision methods are chipping things away and moving them around and trying to get things right. I'm also open in my own writing to failure. I want to fail. I want to go to a place where I don't know what I'm doing, where maybe I'm lost. And in that uncertain space, I make decisions, and I know all those decisions are going to change everything else. And at a certain point, you just come to a place of rest. In revising, you reduce your options so that nothing is possible, and you just think, I can't change this anymore because I've already passed that decision point.”

“When you screen it the first couple times, you're just trying to get the movie to work, trying to get the story to flow, trying to find out where your areas are where you have enough breath to laugh a little bit. So you're doing that the first two or three screenings, and then finally, you dial the movie in and it's working, and at that point, it's 50/50 as far as what's funny and what's working. Sometimes you'll put something in and it will just die so hard that it'll almost kill the movie.”

“President Trump has the advantage of being surrounded by an excellent cadre of advisors. Kim Jong-un doesn't have any advisors that are going to give him objective counsel. He's surrounded by medal-bedecked sycophants, who dutifully follow him around like puppy dogs with their notebooks open, ascribing his every utterance, and pushing back against the great leader is not a way to get ahead.”