Best 57 quotes of Dorothea Lasky on MyQuotes

Beachy Head brims with electrical currents flying backwards and forwards, with the force of poems that have been well fought out and felt. I hear the currents of Alice Notley, of Bernadette Mayer, of Eileen Myles, and Sylvia Plath

Emily Kendal Frey's The Grief Performance is a book that condenses a journey of finding and re-finding loss into beautiful packages. The packages are the poems and they sit shiny and new on every page of this fabulous and generous book. I want to go into the world that these poems create, just so that I can be given these terrifying presents again and again. I know you will, too. See you there.

Real poetry is a party, a wild party, a party where anything might happen. A party from which you may never return home.

All of it is because Of how badly you lied to me I thought it was just you and me Or at the very least a tiny epigram

Am I going to die and all I will have are these fucking poems

And forgot about me You forgot about me And what I meant to you And then it was over

And I go looking looking for you in the streets And I never find you I never find you at all

And that is what we do with a lover And no you're not that That you made sure

A voice said to me, in summer language: Dottie, you are blessed And I felt the yellow light of the sun eating my face

Complainers Some people don't want to die Because you can't complain when you're dead I hope heaven is just a bunch of men lying around Ready to do what I say Ready with dicks and some such When I'm dead I won't be looking for a partner As much as a heavenly creature After all I was promised virgins But I don't care about that as much As the eyes looking into me in abandon Like porn but better Because there will be no screen There will be no holy divider then Between me and my brethren And the smell of sunshine Will emit from every brow That's the kind of thing I expect from death That's the kind of thing I'm waiting for

Because poetry reminds you That there is no dignity In living You just muddle through and for what

But a person can make a beautiful bed And murder you in it And that's what you did And not fuck me in it

But death is the ultimate blissfulness To be a candy or a corpse The world holds you on its tongue And no one can save you

But there is there to carry us past it

But what if I don't like anything as much as I pretend to

Endless suffering and circle

He has a box of things that are separate and strange I think when he looks this way and that That he is making a play for me I think in so many ways he does it all for me

I have disillusionment of all o'clocks

I never knew what feeling was I only felt the pain

I never noticed anything but you But you but you So that I couldn't sleep

In every scene I am waiting for you To be with me in dreams

In the deepest part I still loved him Had gone with him To the blazing star lodge

I only felt the pain The things the you inflicted on me

I put myself in I mean for what, why, Or who Did I manage to do this for if not you

I sit there bloodless And my lust, too It rings

It is as if I had made you believe In me once again It is as if you knew I was your true love It was as if I didn't have to know In this life All you were to me Was that flower

I've only fucked seven guys in my whole life But I've watched more porn than you ever will Hours and hours

I watch porn Cause I'll never be in love

I will go back and forth and never be

I will fill the poems with great pain

I wrapped myself in leaden sheets And sank deep into my own infernal ocean

My fear extends into the stars Don't you know I never will

Not sure what of this you did offer me Never did amount to anything So with this I go

Perverse obsessions And it is only now That I realize I am bleeding Now no air now dead And that it was your careful strike That made it so

Shoot sparks of green and grey Through time

That true love cannot be calculated or contained

The blue night with trees Everything told me to feel something And yet everything you said was a lie And all my emotions were for nothing

The Process of Explication" I Students, look at this table And now when you see a man six feet tall You can call him a fathom. Likewise, students when yes and you do that and other stuff Likewise too the shoe falls upon the sun And the alphabet is full of blood And when you knock upon a sentence in the Process of explication you are going to need a lot of rags Likewise, hello and goodbye. II Nick Algiers is my student And he sits there in a heap in front of me thinking of suicide And so, I am the one in front of him And I dance around him in a circle and light him on fire And with his face on fire, I am suddenly ashamed. Likewise the distance between us then Is the knife that is not marriage. III Students, I can’t lie, I’d rather be doing something else, I guess Like making love or writing a poem Or drinking wine on a tropical island With a handsome boy who wants to hold me all night. I can’t lie that dreams are ridiculous. And in dreaming myself upon the moon I have made the moon my home and no one Can ever get to me to hit me or kiss my lips. And as my bridegroom comes and takes me away from you You all ask me what is wrong and I say it is That I will never win.

There are things you want to say but don't There are things I want to say but I already said them A year ago or two or five, when we first met There were times I thought you knew I loved you You never knew We never were I died You died That's it

There was a lonely summer Where I took the string and unraveled the magic circle from everything It was because of you, and what you did to me

There were things I wished I'd said And done But it is too late now So I go Heavy with my offering This book, this book

The sugar the ice on planets and stars The romance of the evening Coated in ice from your dead flesh Already rotting from within

They took the red string which bound me to you They sank it in the center of the ocean

Thought Moves you past these lines Into conversation With the undead

To get rejected so vehemently Over and over again Until some said it was the rejection I was after No it wasn't I wanted the intensity that you sometimes promised

What is living But fear

What is the dull river Lethe I don't know, but I think it's evil And when I drink of it I don't see stars Instead I see the lime groves

What's worse To never have them To have them only in part What's worse To be endlessly waiting To be endlessly waiting What's worse—nothing or nothing What's worse

When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exist. I can’t suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy—or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn’t shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped (including the shapes of the trees along the constellation-road). A great poet knows never to expect sun or rain or cold or wind in the process of creating a poem. In a great poem all can come to the fore at once. It would be worse yet, if none are there at all.

Why? Because a demon is after me And he she it has been Since the day I was born