LA Larkin Quotes
Rhythms and sounds are often the first thing I hear and want in a poem, so I can't imagine trying to translate something without at least being able to hear what it sounds like.
It takes courage to get clear about what your vision of the work is and to be persistent about it and pursue it, whatever you're saying. I'm still in a long learning process.
People need what they think of as a poem to be read at their bar mitzvah, their wedding, a funeral, whatever. And people are looking for hope and inspiration. I understand that.
I'm much more capable of cutting back than of expanding. I've gotten very surgical about poems.
I'm trying to stay open to the idea that the Internet is not the evil foe of publishing but the handmaiden that will turn out to be a blessing for poets and writers.
There are some books in which every poem is a facet of the same thing. So the book is like a piece of music. And there are books of poems that I love so much that I carry them around with me.
My books have come many years apart and each one seems to reflect a period of experience. Ending the book is like putting a period on a certain movement. Interior and external - both.
I worked in an art gallery for a few years, doing administrative assistance stuff, and it exposed me to what the whole world of art dealers and the art market was about.
From the beginning. I was a poem-writing child. I wrote little novels in my composition book when I was eight, nine years old.
I think parenting actually makes you lose pieces of your soul again, because they go off, into your children. Or, I mean, I am so fragmented, and I'm such a spacey person.
Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are, to recreate the familiar, eternalizing the poet's own perception in unique and original verbal form.
It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.
A writer once said to me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast: The rest is a desert full of bigots. That's what I think I'd like . . . a version of pastoral.
Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood.
To put one brick upon another, Add a third, and then a fourth, Leaves no time to wonder whether What you do has any worth.
And immediately Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
Life is first boredom, then fear. Whether or not we use it, it goes, And leaves what something hidden from us chose, And age, and then the only end of age.
The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.
Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd.
In times when nothing stood but worsened, or grew strange, there was one constant good: she did not change.
Many famous feet have trod Sublunary paths, and famous hands have weighed The strength they have against the strength they need; And famous lips interrogated God Concerning franchise in eternity.
My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.
It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.
I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
