Stephen Dobyns Quotes

Love doesn't need a reason. Hate needs a reason.

One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.

A poem is a window that hangs between two or more human beings who otherwise live in darkened rooms.

Actions have consequences. Ignorance about the nature of those actions does not free a person from responsibility for the consequences. (28)

I write poems to find out why I write them

Baudelaire's L'Héautontimorouménos was long seen to be a sexual sadomasochistic poem, it is now generally accepted that the poem is about writing poetry.

Each thing I do, I rush through, so I can do something else.

It was as if pain were a room he had entered and the door had been locked behind him.

I'm reading a manuscript by Rodney Jones, "Village Prodigies",it's one of the best contemporary poetry books I've ever read ever.

I can't believe there is a poet who hasn't eagerly put down a word one day, only to erase it the next day deciding it was sheer lunacy. It's part of the process of selection.

There's a Welsh poet, R.S. Thomas. He was a very crotchety, strange man, but his poems are wonderful. He was nominated for the Nobel in the 1990s but never won.

Reading a good poem can give me a far bigger kick than a novel. But it's not something I can keep doing. It would be like shooting up 10 times a day.

Other than fiction and poetry I tend to read history.

Many of my poems try to use a comic element to reach a place that isn't comic at all. The comic element works as a surprise. It is unexpected and energizing.

I had not read George Eliot, so read a few. I felt ashamed I hadn't read "Middlemarch" before.

I remember coming upon Philip Larkin in my 20s in the early '60s and when Sylvia Plath's "Ariel" came out it knocked me off my feet.

I never read Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier." I've been reading books that I should have read years ago and did not. That's one of them.

Louise Gluck, C.K. Williams, Thomas Lux. A lot of the poets that I like are the ones that influenced me as a writer.