The mockery (Phillips)

The most ambitious contemporary poets tend to be haunted by the ridiculousness of poetry, its irrelevance, its pretentiousness, the selectiveness of its attention and the kind of focus required for its reading. "I, too, dislike it," Marianne Moore's three-line poem "Poetry" begins: "Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in/ it, after all, a place for the genuine." Because poetry is always tempted to pose as poetry rather than to say or sound like something unusual and interesting (i.e. genuine), it is often on the verge of self-parody. It's this that gives the best modern poetry its edge. Unlike prose writers, poets are like stand-up comics; their bad lines are dangerous because there are worse things than being ignored. Poetry is always high-risk because of the mockery that is always around, especially in the poet himself.

Adam Phillips

Retention (Auden)

Victorious over
the foreign tyrant,
the patriots retained

his emergency
police regulations
devised to suppress them.

W.H. Auden, Marginalia

Precision

Much is accomplished at a relatively low level of precision.

The difference

Men are volcanic; women, oceanic.

No bit of history

There is no bit of history so well documented that it cannot be occluded by fabulation.

Wiser

It is wiser to be confused than to be mistaken.

Magic

The most transcendent magic is to make
poems asleep and dreams awake.

A poem is

A poem is a song of discovery
sung to oneself.

I am who I am (Szymborska)

I am who I am.
A coincidence no less unthinkable
than any other.

Wislawa Szymborska, Among the Multitudes

Hit with a poem (Plum)

When I get hit with a poem, that's it. I can't keep a job because I can't say, "I can't be there today because I've got a poem."

Joe Plum

What poets do

What poets do is not so different from what everyone does. We just leave a more visible stain.

To live forever (Shepherd)

I write because I would like to live forever. The fact of my future death offends me. Part of this derives from my sense of my own insignificance in the universe. My life and death are a barely momentary flicker. I would like to become more than that. That the people and things I love will die wounds me as well. I seek to immortalize the world I have found and made for myself, even knowing that I won’t be there to witness that immortality, mine or my work’s, that by definition I will never know whether my endeavor has been successful. But when has impossibility ever deterred anyone from a cherished goal?

...

Art reminds us of the uniqueness, particularity, and intrinsic value of things, including ourselves. I sometimes have little sense of myself as existing in the world in any significant way outside of my poetry. That’s where my real life is, the only life that’s actually mine.

...

Art itself is so vulnerable, to time, to indifference, especially in a society like ours that cares nothing for the potentials art offers, that if anything seeks to repress them in the name of profit or proper order. I have an intense desire to rescue these things that have touched me and place them somewhere for safekeeping, which is both impossible and utterly necessary.

Reginald Shepherd

Sleep (Dybek)

in each doorway
a cat preaches sleep.

Stuart Dybek, Night Walk

Conscience

Conscience can't match villainy.

There is a world (Ruefle)

There is a world which poets cannot seem to enter. It is the world everybody else lives in. And the only thing poets seem to have in common is their yearning to enter this world.

Mary Ruefle

Clarity (Glück)

I am prepared now to force
clarity upon you.

Louise Glück

The uselessness of poetry (Shepherd)

Poetry is potentially liberating because its uselessness marks out a space not colonized by or valued by capital.

Reginald Shepherd