Martha Ronk Quotes

Our mind is dark in some way, and so we use rhetoric as a kind of prop or foil.

Looking out a window from different vantage points changes what you see and therefore what you write.

I can't remember the past, or I can't see very clearly, or I've gotten older and the person I was isn't there anymore, and the place I grew up isn't where I live now.

I think those of us who use language are always trying for this, trying to keep everything from floating away by trying to write about it despite failure.

I'm always somehow drawn to that sense of how fragile things are and how a garden means so differently depending upon whose language you happen to be in or whose century you happen to be in.

I've always been interested in the fragility of things, and with special urgency now because of climate change, but also because of the accidents of reading.

Gardens do offer a temporal tableau and certainly mean differently in different eras and indeed geographies (think of the formal gardens in France).

I prefer always to think that I am creating a book, not a series of stand-alone poems.

The days start to be charged not because tomorrow you're leaving, but because in three weeks you're leaving. The future impinges. So you start to think about the frame.

Often poets fall into groups that exclude others, and don't pay attention to those who write in different ways. It seems so limited to me.

I want literature to open all the doors that I can't open by myself, and to allow me to see things that I wouldn't otherwise see.

Language is as fragile as the little alpine plant.

I try to attach myself to things around me so that they don't slip away.

If it's a drop of dew, it will dissolve.

Even your own memory changes over time because of circumstances or even because your body changes.

I'm really interested in what you remember, how you remember, what your perspective is as opposed to somebody else's.

For me, failure has to be acknowledged, needs to be faced in some way.

Each of us is present, but partially.

I spend a lot of time revising. I'm not somebody who can move slowly.

I can't move my body slowly. I can't move the line slowly. So I end up with way too much, often opaque to me later.

A number of poems don't work alone. They need to fit together to work.