Marvin Bell Quotes

Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, break the new rules.

Prose is prose because of what it includes; poetry is poetry because of what it leaves out.

I'm partial to coffee shops, brain work, and poems on the page. I write after midnight. Sometimes, twisty syntax happens, and I surrender.

Our job is to become more and more of what we are. The growth of a poet seems to be related to his or her becoming less and less embarrassed about more and more.

Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate.

The writing of a poem is, for me, in the first place, an almost total act of abandon leading to discovery leading to recognition.

The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking

Poetry is the least imposition on silence in a world of chatter.

A nation's art is the expression of its soul.

Sometimes the best revision of a poem is a new poem.

I speak to you in one tongue/ but every moment that ever mattered to me/ occurred in another language.