Cate Marvin Quotes

When fiction writers like my poems I feel like I've hit the jackpot.

I am like a table that eats its own legs off because it’s fallen in love with the floor.

I admire the poetic relationship to place as enacted in Wallace Stevens' poems; his poetics strikes me as an argument against the restraints of realism.

New York is one of those places people tend to derive a sense of identity from - as if, were to you to remove them from the City, they'd turn limp and colorless.

I consider poetry my vocation, not my "career." My career is as a university professor; that's what pays the bills.

When asked what I'd be if I weren't a writer, I'm tempted to respond with one of father's favorite phrases, one I despised while growing up: "I hate 'what-ifs.'"

There IS a difference between poetry and prose! Poems should be sonically charged and new to the ear.

I like it when poems are challenging, when they concern matters important and personal to the author.

I place a lot of emphasis on process and revision because I believe that all of my students can become better writers through hard work.

I've just always loved animals. So I've often thought that if I weren't a writer I'd work for some nonprofit organization that does something positive for animals.

One cannot have "success" in poetry. If I wanted to be successful, I'd have become a lawyer.

One of the reasons poetry is such an amazing genre to work with is because it constantly reinvents itself and re-negotiates its terms with the reader.

Confessional poetry is, to my mind, more slippery than poems that are sloppily autobiographical; I find the confessional mode much more akin to dramatic monologue.

I have no precise idea of who makes up my readership. I'm surprised when I discover people have read my poems at all.

Place is extremely important to my work because I am always pulling landscape imagery into my poems.

The cool thing about having a book is that it takes on its own life. Once it's in the world, you can't follow it. You'd have to have a pretty fantastic surveillance system to track its migration.

We lay our words like tenuous plats, build a bridge over itsunsinkable depth: Not a sea of longing, but the brack of wanting what’s physicalto help us forget we are physical.