Quotes from Marilyn Nelson

One of my graduate school professors, to whom I started sending poems when I started writing again after a 10-year hiatus, suggested I prepare a book manuscript which he could send to publishers for me.

For much of my life - my sister and I have talked about this - when we moved, we just thought the world behind us disappeared, and all of the people, they just didn't exist any more.

Back when I was in college, people used to talk about the alienation of the artist, not ever quite fitting in any place.

After you kind of find your footing, sonnets are what comes easiest.

Miracles happen all the time. We're here, aren't we?

How sweet it is to let God purge our souls of ego and bitterness, and to have a little taste of heaven here on earth.

What is gentlest in love is love's violence. Losing yourself in love, you reach love's goal. Love makes you suffer, as love makes you whole. Love steals your everything and makes you rich. Love is both meaningless and poetry. Captured by love, by love you are set free.

Since she seen Fortune head in that big pot Miss Lydia say that room make her feel ill, sick with the thought of boiling human broth. I wonder how she think it make me feel? To dust the hands what use to stroke my breast; to dust the arms what hold me when I cried; to dust where his soft lips were and his chest what curved its warm against my back at night. From the poem Dinah's Lament (15)

The filth hissed at us when we venture out-- always in twos or threes, never alone-- seems less a language spoken than one spat in savage plosives, primitive, obscene: a cavemob nya-nya, limited in frame of reference and novelty, the same suggestions of what we or they could do or should, ad infinitum.

There's more beauty on Earth than I can bear.

When we lose contact, we see only hate, only injustice, a giant so great its shadow blocks our sun.

Loss is the wisdom behind song.

Writing in form is a way of developing your thinking - your thinking along with the tradition. In a way, it's not you alone, it's you in partnership.

Many performance poets seem to believe that yelling a poem makes it comprehensible. They are wrong.