Best 17 quotes of Jorie Graham on MyQuotes

A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

Brilliant, hard-earned and honest. The erasures and reappearances of figure and ground-that hard drama-have rarely been so movingly undertaken. A heartbreakingly beautiful work.

If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.

I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it . Because there is, of course, always the desire, the hope, that they are not two separate worlds, sound and silence, but that they become each other, that only our hearing fails.

I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it.

It's very hard to look in a mirror and see anything which resembles what one feels one's self to be. I think that discomfort, that dislocation, disintegration - that raw lack of feeling whole - that dysmorphia - is a very good place, in this moment, to hunt for the kind of experience which really requires the means of poetry to be grasped or felt.

I wanted to pack a lot into the lyric, but not go beyond its bounds. Some have written that I wanted to expand what the lyric could do. I just want the hugeness of experience-which includes philosophical discursiveness-to move at a rate of speed that kept it (because all within one unity of experience) emotional. Also, often, questions became the way the poems propelled themselves forward It brings the reader in as a listener to a confession[.] A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession.

The primary function of the creative use of language - in our age - is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive.

There are moments in our lives which, threaded, give us heaven—

These are crystalline - oftentimes incandescent - translations of Juarroz's powerful metaphysical poems where eternity and silence jut up against a world where “writing infects the landscape” and there are “more letters than leaves” - The kind of match one hopes for where both the translator and the poet are in luck; new poems which don't leak and yet old poems in which the original passion shines.

The storm: I close my eyes and, standing in it, try to make it mine.

Water is a miracle - it takes so many forms - is the core of life - is holy. So it becomes important to pay utmost attention to the holiness which is this planet's life - blood, which we are destroying. I always look for it in a poem. I honor it. I pay it mind.

Where mathematics and spirit join, where proof of the existence of mystery-salvific mystery-shimmers just below the surfaces of human perception, experience and the linguistic veil itself, Killarney Clary's new book-her best to date-dwells, plumbs, persuades and thrills.

and angle of vision, dust, gravity, solitude, and the part of the law which is the world's waiting and the part of the law which is my waiting, and the part which is my impatience—now; now?— though there are, there really are things in the world, you must believe me.

the feeling of being a digression not the link in the argument, a new direction, an offshoot, the limb going on elsewhere, and liking that error, a feeling of being capable because an error, of being wrong perhaps altogether wrong a piece from another set stripped of position stripped of true function and loving that error, loving that filial form, that break from perfection where the complex mechanism fails, where the stranger appears in the clearing, out of nowhere and uncalled for, out of nowhere to share the day.

This is freedom. This is the face of faith, nobody gets what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself. Also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something at sea. Here hands full of sand, letting it sift through in the wind, I look in and say take this, hurry. And if I listen now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only something I did. I could not chose words. I am free to go. I cannot, of course, come back. Not to this. Never. It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

Towards the end of the season it is not bad to have the body. To have experienced joy as the mere lifting of hunger is not to have known it less.