Junkyard Quotes

1) From a conversation about winter in Georgia: "I just want some casually-thin gloves"
2) From Fernando Pessoa's "Tobacco Shop" - "I went off to the country with great plans, / But found there were only trees and plants there, / And when there were people, they were just like people anywhere" - - "Genius? At this moment / A hundred thousand heads are busy thinking they're geniuses, like / me, / And who knows if history will remember even one of them." - - "The world is made for those born to conquer it, / Not for those who dream of conquering it, however right they may be"
3) From Charles Simic's "A Letter" - "I went to visit my friend Bob who said to me: / 'We reach the real by overcoming the / Seduction of images.' / I was overjoyed, until I realized / Such abstinence will never be possible for me. / I caught myself looking out the window." - - From Simic's "The Betrothal" - "Eternity jealous / Of the present moment, / It occured to me! / And then the moment was over."
4) From conversation: "Put it out in the grass and let it turn into the rest of the earth"
5) From conversation: "He has no head right now. No brain in his head. His head is in his feet, his brain."
6) Conversation: "When pregnant, the rhythm of having sex actually puts the baby to sleep"
7) Conversation: "Irony doubled back on itself"
8) From class: "Poetry resists its own definition"
9) From Lydia Davis's "Break It Down" - "you're happy about it and you're planning it all, not in your head, really, somewhere inside your body, or all through your body, it's all mounting up and coming together so that when you get in bed you can't help it, it's a real performance, it all pours out, but slowly"
10) Also from "Break It Down" - "And once she lay over against me late in the night and she started talking, her breath in my ear, and she just went on and on, and talked faster and faster, she couldn't stop, and I loved it, I just felt that all that life in her was running into me too, I had so little life in me, her life, her fire, was coming into me, in that hot breath in my ear, and I just wanted her to go on talking forever right there next to me, and I would go on living, like that, I would be able to go on living, bit without her I don't know. Then you forget some of it all, maybe most of it all, almost all of it, in the end, and you work hard at remembering everything now so you won't ever forget, but you can kill it too even by thinking about it too much, though you can't help thinking about it nearly all the time."
11) From Rainer Maria Rilke: "I have faith in all those things that are not yet said."
12) From Rilke: "What a wonderful building, / moving inside itself, held up by itself, / forming figures, giant wings, canyons, / and high mountians, before the first star / and suddenly, there: a door so far off that maybe / only birds have ever felt that kind of distance"
13) Rilke: "Finally, using both my eyes / I close my face, / and when it lies with its weight in my hand / it looks almost like rest. / That's so they won't think I have nowhere / to lay my head"
14) Rilke: "I too live where there are no roads, / in the mist that turns most people back, / and I've seen myself often too go out under my own eyelids"
15) Rilke: "Because inside human beings / is where God learns"
16) From Bruce Bond: "a strip of bacon crackles like paper at Christmas"
17) Bond: "that far surf / where life first sprouted its legs and crawled / ashore to dry its tail in the morning sun."
18) From Dean Young: "Form is the shape of the selecting intelligence because / time is running out."
"When you slice yourself open / you don't find a construct"
"Even with everything there is a point / at which there is no more"
"There's nothing worse / than a poem that doesn't stop"
"What form knows about me will be my end"
19) From conversation: "Things move too fast - that's why we have speed-limits"
20) Conversation: "But my human side. Well, I've always had a poetic way of communicating with myself"
21) From Melville's Benito Cereno:
“The ship seems unreal; these strange costumes, gestures, and faces, but a shadowy tableau just emerged from the deep, which directly must receive back what it gave.”
“And yet when he roused himself, dilated his chest, felt himself strong on his legs, and coolly considered it -- what did all these phantoms amount to?”
"What are you knotting there, my man?"
"The knot," was the brief reply, without looking up.
"So it seems; but what is it for?"
"For some one else to undo," muttered back the old man, plying his fingers harder than ever, the knot being now nearly completed."
"Eating of his own words"
22) Conversation: "I hope I'll be back tomorrow. I hope we'll all be back tomorrow."
23) Conversation: "I'm going home with the crazies"
24) Port O'Brien: "Was I everywhere I've been?"
25) Peter Rohl: "No one has yet worn the Sun in his buttonhole."
26) John Poch: "For instance, time's crossroads times zero equals infinity"
27) Conversation: "I never thought I'd be blind enough to lose my own glasses"
28) Poch: "When a person dies, it's not a page ripped out / of a book. It's a chapter / in another language / nearly written."
29) From Lux at the workshop: "I thought everyone knew how to spell dirt."
30) From Travis at the Tech workshop: "Nothing really screws up a good story like the truth."
31) Also from Travis: "Cleave is the opposite of itself"
32) From Baudelaire: "The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being conquered"
33) From Robert Hass: "Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it sufferns no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly"
34) Phoenix: "We're sick for the big sun"
35) Robert Hass: "Surrealism, I'm tempted to say, is syntax: not weird images but the way the mind connects them"
36) Hass: "The Puritan can't tell one from another and knows they are all bad; the poet can't tell either, only he knows they belong to the dark and are good"
37) Hass: "The means, this style that is to make transformation possible, keeps wanting to be the end, the transformation itself, the beauty by which we are justified"
38) Marie Howe: "One day it happens: what you have feared all your life, / the unendurably specific, the exact thing. No matter what you say or do. / This what my brother said: Here, sit closer to the bed / so I can see you."
39) Howe: "something began to move through the room, / as if energy were / rising, like thickening air, / as if spirit were pleasure / pushing through the room, through / even our faces, / a molecular, invisible..."
40)Conversation: "You know, we always eat with our eyes first"
41)Conversation: "The world's coming out of the walls!"
42) Matt & Kim: "We cut the legs off of our pants"
43) Adrienne Rich: "But poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know"
44) Adrienne Rich: "You have to be free to play around with the notion that day may be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name"
45) Bruce Bond: "to feel like a child is never a child's feeling"
46) Conversation: "Forgotten forgetfulness"
47) Conversation: "The sun makes that river look like a star-studded snake"
48) Conversation: "Well fell into what we have fallen for"
49) Tallest Man on Earth:
"And I will tell it to the mighty wind that
I have traded once again
And I will listen to the backwards music
With a propeller in my hand"
50) Conversation: "His nose is under the trail"
51) Conversation: "That makes complete nonsense!"
52) Conversation: "I don't want pressure to be in your head"
53) Ashley Warner, in conversation: "My daughter will cary bikebells everywhere she goes, and she'll have empty air-fresheners, as earrings."
54) Conversation: "He could tell how much he weighed by shaking his hand"
55) Lux workshop: "Then there's that sixth sense we have in poetry. Almost unnameable"
56) Class: "I just counter-argued myself"
57) Conversation: "She was the short-headed girl"
58) From Sandy Meek in Class (just found these in my notebook): "Whatever works for the service of a poem"
59) Meek: "In order to write you need to create a state of emergency"
60) Meek: "My vision is not to bore myself - each composition has its own needs"
61) Tom Waits, from "Circus": "And then there was Yodeling Elaine, the Queen of the air, who wore a
dollar sign medallion and she had a tiny bubble of spittle Around her nostril and a little rusty tear, for she had lassoed and lost another tipsy sailor"
62) Tom Waits, from "Time": "the wind is making speeches and the rain sounds like a round of applause"
"And the things you can't remember tell the things you can't forget that history puts a saint in every dream"
63) Waits, from "9th & Hennepin": "And you take on the dreams of the ones who have slept here / And I'm lost in the window, and I hide in the stairway / And I hang in the curtain, and I sleep in your hat...And no one brings anything small into a bar around here / They all started out with bad directions"