Best 10 quotes of Dan Chiasson on MyQuotes

I do care about the consequences of being negative toward people who are powerful. But I'm more afraid of not being taken seriously as a critic - by editors, by readers.

I feel most myself when I'm reading, but by that I don't mean that I'm most comfortable when I'm reading. I feel most fully a person who's torn between attention and inattention, between loving and hating, between hyper-responsiveness and total dullness. Reading is not a comfortable experience for me.

I seem to thrive by destroying the last thing I did, in a kind of cartoon Nietzsche way. Emerson says in "Experience" something like "every ultimate fact soon becomes the next in a series." The self feels more real when you are destroying things you've made than when you are paying them homage. That's the good news about being self-destructive. The bad news, I feel I don't need to deliver.

I treat myself as one of the sources. And, again, I think that’s accurate. One of the poets I read most frequently is myself. I really do. I read my own poems obsessively.

It's often said that elephants are the most human of animals - there's something comical about their acquiescence, and tragic also. The long elephant poem - I was trying to write from the point of view of someone who had been seduced by the logic of his punishers and who, in a kind of awful way, could reproduce the very logic that had put him in this predicament in the first place. And maybe, in some kind of minor way, that's something I feel about myself, or maybe about all selves, that they fall in love with the thing that oppresses them.

One problem with writing on the computer, as I do, is that the page is never really 'blank." It is backed by all this energy or potential energy...one can always check the New York Times, or look at real estate, or investigate some intriguing new person in one's life. The span and space for writing feels like a tunnel under these massive mountains of information.

The issue is that when you're a critic it's hard to tell the difference between the thrill of denouncing and telling the truth. Telling the truth to me feels more often like denouncing than like praising. There are many more concrete advantages in the world for people who praise than for those who denounce. So if you want to tell the truth, oftentimes you're going to err on the side of denouncing. That's just something I have to work on.

The main thing in poetry criticism is that I have all these opinions, and I love having something to do with them. And I think it's important that people try not to be false. The ideal would be that everybody says everything in print. I don't know that it's that I'm not afraid.

If you can orbit the planet, why can't you see what makes the human heart happy? Is it art or is it sex? Or is it, as I suspect, just keeping going from next thing to next thing to next thing to next thing to next to next to next to next pulsating stupidly to outlast time?

There are varieties of life unknown to you. Their whole identity is: you can't find out.