Frank Bidart Quotes

But being is making; not only large things, a family, a book, a business; but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between friends, a meal.

We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.

Insanity is the insistence on meaning.

We live in a hell of opinions.

Once you reach what is / inside it is outside.

Earth you know is round but seems flat. // You can't trust / your senses.

Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves.

To make a film you have to dream a film... that's true of poetry as well.

Play, and escaping the ideology one grew up in, is freedom.

Though the body is itsgenesis, a poem is the vision of a processCarved in space, vision your poor eye's singlearmor against winter spring summer fall

drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnalround, the monotonous sorrow of the finite, within       I am awakerepairing in dirt the frayed immaculate threadforced by being to watch the birth of suns

The stratagems by which briefly youameliorated, even seeminglyuntwisted what still twists within you —you loved their taste and lay thereon your sidenursing like a puppy.

Horrible the fate of the advice-giver in our culture: to repeat oneself in a thousand contexts until death, or irrelevance.            *I abjure advice-giver.

Though the body is itsgenesis, a poem is the vision of a p

I'm not a fool, I knew from the beginningwhat couldn't happen. What couldn't