Quotes from John Ciardi

Translator's Note: When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same "music", the same air. But it can do so only when it is as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet. Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone

He had his choice, and he liked the worst.

A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.

Love is the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old.

There was a young lady from Gloucester Who complained that her parents both bossed her, So she ran off to Maine. Did her parents complain? Not at all -- they were glad to have lost her.

The public library is the most dangerous place in town

To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry.

The Constitution gives every American the inalienable right to make a damn fool of himself.

A good question is never answered.

One night I dreamed I was locked in my Father's watch With Ptolemy and twenty-one ruby stars Mounted on spheres and the Primum Mobile Coiled and gleaming to the end of space And the notched spheres eating each other's rinds To the last tooth of time, and the case closed.

The day will happen whether or not you get up.

You don't have to suffer to be a poet

A man is what he does with his attention.

Hell is the denial of the ordinary...

The fact that a good poem will never wholly submit to explanation is not its deficiency but its very life. One lives every day what he cannot define. It is feeling that is first. What one cannot help but sense in good poetry is a sense of the whole language stirring toward richer possibilities than one could have foreseen.

I once knew a word I forget That mean "I am sorry we met And I wish you the same." It sounds like your name But I haven't remember that yet.

Poetry is man's best means of perceiving most profoundly the action and the consequence of his own emotions.

Who could believe an ant in theory? A giraffe in blueprint? Ten thousand doctors of what's possible Could reason half the jungle out of being.

Such perfect incompleteness, suggestion and ambiguity are among the most valuable devices of the skilled poet, means by which the poem opens to let us in.

Every word has a history. Every word has an image locked into its roots.

What greater violence can be done to the poet's experience than to drag it into an early morning classroom and to go after it as an item on its way to a Final Examination? …It is the experience, not the Final Examination, that counts.

A dollar saved is a quarter earned.

What has any poet to trust more than the feel of the thing? Theory concerns him only until he picks up his pen, and it begins to concern him again as soon as he lays it down.