Best 43 quotes of Pattiann Rogers on MyQuotes

A poetic list is a talent in itself. You can write a list of things, and it can be boring.

As far as I can tell, writing the essays didn't change the way I wrote poetry. Although the essays contain scattered passages that might be called lyrical, they often contain closed statements of what is only suggested in the poetry.

For me, prose is never a poem. Because with prose there are so very few tools to create the music. And one of the most important tools missing is the ability to create silences, as you can in poetry by how you fashion the lines and breaks within the lines and stanzas.

From the beginning I felt that I didn't ever want to leave the impression that the process of writing a poem is totally mysterious. I couldn't explain everything that went on in the creation of a poem, but I could try to explain as much as I knew. I thought readers deserved that. I didn't want to set myself apart as being someone special.

How can I appreciate light from an aging sun shining through new configurations neither pine nor ash? How can I extol the nuturing fragrances from the spires, the spicules of a landscape not yet formed or seeded?

I approach writing a poem in a much different state than when I am writing prose. It's almost as if I were working in a different language when I'm writing poetry. The words - what they are and what they can become - the possibilities of the words are vastly expanded for me when I'm writing a poem.

I do love writing prose interspersed with the poetry of other people. Their rhythms break into my prose and create a connection.

I don't write or think too much about the word "salvation." I might; I probably should. We are such needy creatures, needing to be saved, to feel we are saved or might be, however we define ourselves, however we define that word.

If I'm excited by something bodily, and curious about it, I generally want to delve into it and explore it with poetry. That's the way I ordinarily watch the world around me.

I have thought for many years that the audience any creative writer imagines has a great effect on what gets written.

I like poetry because poetry - even in free verse - is formal, and it has to be very concise and packed and rich, and I like the feeling of having to do that, having to make the language tight and still free, as if the deepest freedom is created by the restrictions.

I love the language. I'm just totally fascinated by the sound and the look of words and the kinds of cadences you can create with them, the various kinds of music.

I'm primarily a poet, so I'd have to say in my case I'd investigate the mystery in poetry in a different way than prose might investigate it, in a way that includes the power of the music of language and maybe more imaginatively in poetry, but I don't really know about better or worse. I guess it depends on the writer.

In I Praise My Destroyer, Diane Ackerman demonstrates once again her love for the specific language that rises from the juncture of self and the natural world, and her skillful use of that language. Whether she turns her attention to the act of eating an apricot 'the color of shame and dawn,' or to 'the omnipotence of light,' or to grief when 'All the greens of summer have blown apart,' her linking of unique images, her energetic wit and whimsy, her compassionate investment in life, always bring new pleasures and perceptions to the reader.

In poetry I can let the language go, allow an image that seems out of place to enter and see what happens, always listening to the music that's being created, just like the world around us, never predictable, always shifting and intertwining, reflecting and echoing itself.

I see my poems as interlinked. No poem gives an answer. It may offer other questions, it may instigate other questions that then become poems.

I think my prose - mine and that of others - sometimes slips into a cadence or rhythm that can replicate or come close to the music in a wonderful poem, and then it returns to the sound of prose.

I think parts of my soul have been saved by my writing, not in the sense of escaping death, but escaping the death of the moment, perhaps.

I think the language of science is highly lyrical and evocative and an important part of our lives in many ways.

It sounds old-fashioned to say, but we have some kind of purpose for being here, not poets or writers, but all of us humans.

My object when writing prose is to write as clearly as possible. I think I know what I'm saying in prose, and I want others to understand it and to be able to restate it.

Often I'm struck by something that I read; then I go and research it a little more, especially if I begin a poem, and I find out that I need to know more. Then I usually get intrigued and excited about whatever it is I'm writing about.

One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.

Ordering is very important with essays, even if a reader doesn't read the essays or the poems in order through the book...

People sometimes think that defining a term is pedantic and useless, but terms need to be defined if they're going to be discussed, even if the terms are only defined for a single conversation. Those involved in the conversation need to know how the terms are being used.

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

Poetry is so close to music, not just in cadence and sound but in silences. That's why, to me, I can't talk about prose poems. I can talk about poetic prose.

Poetry is very playful with language. I think all poetry, at its heart, is playful. It's doing unusual and playful things with the language, stirring it up. And prose is not doing that. Primarily it's not attempting to do that.

Poetry uses language to create a music borne inside human experiences and emotions.

Sometimes, as in an athletic event where everything clicks, inexplicable things do happen. Learning and practicing an art or a skill has always been part of the success of the goal.

Straight up from this road Away from the fitted particles of frost Coating the hull of each chick pea, And the stiff archer bug making its way In the morning dark, toe hair by toe hair, Up the stem of the trillim, Straight up through the sky above this road right now, The galaxies of the Cygnus A cluster Are colliding with each other in a massive swarm Of interpenetrating and exploding catastrophes. I try to remember that.

The greatest tragedy that can befall a poet is to be praised by being misunderstood.

The poem is a process, a way for me to discover questions, to ask them clearly or to discover the results of certain suppositions. Suppositions are a form of questioning.

The silences express so much and are so crucial in music, and prose does not allow for the creation of these silences, these white spaces on the page or the computer screen.

To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.

We're all vulnerable in our various ways, and what we are physically, our bodies, is what has developed with the goal of keeping that life safe and intact, at least until we have procreated. That's what our bodies are, the protection of life.

What triggers a poem for me is not the same as what triggers an essay. My mind is geared now to looking for, or to watching out for, the image that attracts my attention or the phrase or the strange juxtaposition that strikes me bodily, or an odd question or supposition.

When the music created by the sounds and ordering of the words matches the thrust of the meanings of the words, then a radiant state of awareness can occur.

Grand Sky/Grand Prairie Both harbor the vastness of space. One holds the space Of starlight, thunder snow, rock and icy comets, scrolls Of clouds; the other the spaces inside see heart and ovum, Root webs, spider webs, budded blossoms. They lean together tightly day and night, pressing One into the other, each creating the horizon of the other. They exchange themselves. At evening one becomes The steady night in which the other lives. Yet witness How the moon first rises from the body of the prairie Into the height of the sky that then possesses it. Their horizons are persistent illusion.

Mothers,fathers,our kind,tell me again that death doesn't matter.Tell me it's just a limitation of vision ,a fold of landscape,a deep flax-and-poppy-filled gully hidden on the hill, pleat in our perception a somersault of existence,natural,even beneficent even a gift,the only key to the red-lacquered door at the end of the hall,"water within water," those old stories.

Seeing the God statement Suppose the statement Blessed Are the pure in heart, for they shall see God were placed like a wreath of violets, Lilies, laurel, and olive, blossoms strung together Like words in a sentence, a garland Launched, set out on a flowing creek Imagine that wreath carried Down the frothy rapids, tossed, floating Slipping over water-smooth, moss-colored Boulders, in and out of slow, dark pools, Through poplar and willow shadows. It dips, Sinks momentarily, emerges, travels, maitains Its ring, its declaration and syntax. At times it widens in a broad, deep Current, makes sense as a gift. The pure becomes inclusive, spatial, Generous. God and heart are two Spread wings of one open reading. And at times it narrows, restricts. Violets and heart entangle With God. The blessed braces, Overlaps lilies and laurel. Still, at any point you might reach down yourself, catch that ring of blossoms, lift it up, wear its beauty and blooming distinction across your forehead. Look into a mirror. See what you can see.

The Congregating of Stars They often meet in mountain lakes, No matter how remote, no matter how deep Down and far they must stream to arrive, Navigating between the steep, vertical piles Of broken limestone and chert, through shattered Trees and dry bushes bent low by winter, Across ravines cut by roaring avalanches Of boulders and ripping ice. Silently, the stars have assembled On the surface of this lost lake tonight, Arranged themselves to match the patterns They maintain in the highest spheres Of the surrounding sky. And they continue on, passing through The smooth, black countenance of the lake, Through that mirror of themselves, down through The icy waters to touch the perfect bottom Stillness of the invisible life and death existing In the nether of those depths. Sky-bound- yet touching every needle In the torn and sturdy forest, every stone, Sharp, cracked along the ragged shore- the stars Appear the same as in ancient human ages On the currents of the old seas and the darkened Trails of desert dunes, Orion’s belt the same As it shone in Galileo’s eyes, Polaris certain above The sails of every mariner’s voyage. An echoing Light from the Magi’s star, that bacon, might even Be shining on this lake tonight, unrecognized. The stars are congregating, perhaps in celebration, passing through their own names and legends, through fogs, airs, and thunders, the vapors of winter frost and summer pollens. They are ancestors of transfiguration, intimate with all the eyes of the night. What can they know?

The Estate of Solemnity By right, it reigns in its places- in long beards Of spanish moss hanging from a live oak On a windless evening, and in the chill of new Icicles rigidly, imperceptibly lengthening. Cavern Stalagmites are almost majestic with solemnity. The black morel and the tree ear mushroom Are solemn without grief, solemn without joy, Solemn without reverence, without a single Flicker of green or lift of a wing or cry. But the most solemn, most stalwart, the least Wavering are the tors and crags, the towering desert Spires and carved pinnacles, the devoted ascents And sharp, raw rims of boulders and bluffs, the maw Of a distant cave I saw yesterday and the day before, And the grave echo there of the day and the before. Mystics and divines have always sought the pure, White-rock serenity of the silent, solemn moon Bound in its flight alone far above the peaks, far Above the earth, surrounded there forever by bevies Of giddy stars, all asparkling, all aglow.