Quotes from Thomas Lynch

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

A good funeral gets the dead where they need to go and the living where they need to be.

I'm lazy but generally task oriented so having a hoop to jump through means eventually I'll make the effort.

Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.

There's no easy way to do this. So do it right: weep, laugh, watch, pray, love, live, give thanks and praise; comfort, mend, honor, and remember.

Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.

I'm more interested in the meaning of funerals and the mourning that people do. It's not a retail experience. It's an existential one.

Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death - the things that make us and undo us, create and destroy, how we breed and disappear and the emotional context that surrounds these events.

So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

The world's supply of heartache is secure. There's love and hate and mayhem everywhere.

We have no parlors anymore, no hearthsides. We have, rather, our family rooms in which light flickers from the widescreen multichannel TV on which we watch reruns of a life we are not familiar with. Kitchens are not cooked in, dining rooms go dusty. Living rooms are a kind of mausolea reserved for "company" that seldom comes.

God knows some days we all feel like losers.

Cuando enterramos a los viejos, enterramos el pasado conocido, el pasado que a veces imaginamos mejor de lo que fue, pero el pasado al fin y al cabo, habitado en parte por nosotros. El recuerdo es el tema inevitable, el consuelo final. Pero cuando enterramos recién nacidos, enterramos el futuro, inmanejable y desconocido, lleno de promesas y posibilidades, de logros teñidos de esperanzas color de rosa.

There's no easy way to do this. So do it right: weep, laugh, watch, pray, love, live, give thanks and praise; comfort, mend, honor, and remember.

Whatever's there to feel, feel it – the riddance, the relief, the fright and freedom, the fear of forgetting, the dull ache of your own mortality. Get with someone you can trust with tears, with anger, and wonderment and utter silence. Get that part done – the sooner the better. The only way around these things is through them.

Grief is the tax we pay on our attachments...

The flush toilet, more than any single invention, has 'civilized' us in a way that religion and law could never accomplish.

Grief is the price we pay for being close to one another. If we want to avoid our grief, we simply avoid each other.

The advance of our technology is coincidental with the loss of our appetite for ethical questions that ought to attend the implications of these new powers. . . In the name of diversity, any idea is regarded as worthy as any other; any nonsense is entitled to a forum, a full hearing, and equal time.

They understood that the meaning of life is connected, inextricably, to the meaning of death; that mourning is a romance in reverse, and if you love, you grieve and there are no exceptions-- only those who do it well and those who don't. And if death is regarded as an embarrassment or an inconvenience, if the dead are regarded as a nuisance from whom we seek a hurried riddance, then life and the living are in for like treatment.

I think maybe Gladstone had it right. I think my father did. They understood that the meaning of life is connected, inextricably, to the meaning of death; that mourning is a romance in reverse, and if you love, you grieve and there are no exceptions---only those who do it well and those who don't.