Quotes from Stephen Dobyns

My poems always begin with a metaphor, but my way into the metaphor may be a word, an image, even a sound. And I rarely know the nature of the metaphor when I begin to write, but there is an attentiveness that a writer develops, a sudden alertness that is much like the feel of a fish brushing against a hook.

I like it to be quiet, and it usually occurs in the morning. There are three or four places in my house where I can write and I like to keep moving around. The moment I find myself falling into a necessary routine, I change it. I'd rather not accumulate superstitions.

Actions have consequences. Ignorance about the nature of those actions does not free a person from responsibility for the consequences. (28)

I'm reading a manuscript by Rodney Jones, "Village Prodigies",it's one of the best contemporary poetry books I've ever read ever.

I can't believe there is a poet who hasn't eagerly put down a word one day, only to erase it the next day deciding it was sheer lunacy. It's part of the process of selection.

Many of my poems try to use a comic element to reach a place that isn't comic at all. The comic element works as a surprise. It is unexpected and energizing.

He was husky, barrel-chested, and my age. The belly was a work in progress. It's the name that was important. He was part-time tough, like I said. Basically he's an accountant and works at a place downtown. He's really dead?" "Well," says Manny, "I didn't check his pulse, but he was in two pieces.

Fill in the blanks, you'd have a novel; keep it short and it's a play by Beckett.

The work of the poet as a vehicle of world harmony has a social character—this is, it is concerned with the doings of the poet's fellow men, among whom he lives and whose fate he shares. He does not speak 'for them' but with them, nor does he set himself apart from them: otherwise he would not be a source of truth.

In order to maintain a capacity for astonishment, the poet can never anticipate the identity of the reader. Once the writer knows for whom he or she is writing, then the writer becomes too conscious of trying to influence that person and to interfere with the intuitive process.

Implicit in this is the conviction that the poem or piece of fiction is a made-thing. It is neither received from outside or erupts out of the artist's peculiar sensitivity and superiority.

if falsehood is your nature, then only by falsehood can you be true.

Am I telling the truth? I think I am a truthful man. From moment to moment I believe myself sincere, but sometimes looking back I can see I've been mistaken, even that I've lied.

I am someone who has spent his adult life on the periphery of literature in the way that a small animal will remain just beyond the glow of the campfire, observing the strange doings of the human creatures settling in for the night.

But the hardest task in any writing is to present the truth so it can be seen as true. One cannot just give the history of an event in a straightforward manner and expect it to be believed. That history must have a shape. It must have direction and movement.

At some level the subject of any story or poem is always the reader, and the writer who ignores this does so at his or her peril.

For years I had been living in a kind of eternal present, shutting off all the past which disagreed with me, letting through only the most censored memories. As for the future, nothing was thought out. It simply happened, like the turning of the page. In filling my life with books, I was ... surrounding myself with other people's stories in order to obliterate my own.

When the form is more important than the content, when it exists to convince or dazzle or decorate or distract, then the form is not rising out of the needs of the content but is being used rhetorically; that is, to convince for its own sake. The eventual effect will be to frustrate us, because we are looking, ultimately, to be moved out of ourselves, to be able for a second to step away and see ourselves in relation to the world.

Is that how you feel, my friend? That the air dislikes you and your lungs feel half-empty?

Like this week." "So you're Carl's replacement?" "I guess you could say that.

Love doesn't need a reason. Hate needs a reason.

Each thing I do, I rush through so I can do something else. In such a way do the days pass---a blend of stock car racing and the never ending building of a gothic cathedral. Through the windows of my speeding car I see all that I love falling away: books unread, jokes untold, landscapes unvisited...

These people you used to see every day, friends or acquaintances, after a while they become as distant as any stranger, people you suddenly recall late at night--you remember something they said or something silly that someone once did. For a few moments they completely occupy your mind; then you forget them again.

It was as if pain were a room he had entered and the door had been locked behind him.