Quotes from Diane Glancy

Poetry uses the hub of a torque converter for a jello mold.

Poetry uses the hub of a torque converter for a jello mold.

Words -- as I speak or write them -- make a path on which I walk.

Writing is the hammer & chisel that breaks down the established way of thinking.

The man who heard the land was not farming, was not hunting, was not gathering wood for the log pile beside the house, but was an ordinary man driving on a highway, and the car stopped, and he heard the land. He thought it might have been the wind he heard, but knew it was the land. He couldn't understand the words, but he knew the land was speaking.

The trees were a seed inside a sail. In the piano music he heard the land; dust on a road, the sun sinking behind earth, the moon in the dark sky, a field of water after rain. It was as if the land gave him an awareness. It was an augmentation or development of some part of himself.

He thought of history moving backward…why did it haunt him? What was he supposed to do? Just know it was there? Just be a witness? The earth plummeted across the sky. The ancestor, the extinct ones, were singing with the wind, some off-key.

The whole universe tumbled in what seemed chaos, but he couldn't bring himself to use that word. The man who heard the land heard his own heart as if it were distant space struggling with its solar dust and clattering, its turbulence on a scale he couldn't comprehend.

Poetry is road maintenance for a fragmented world which seeks to be kept together. It's been an integral activity for a long time.

I try. I am trying. I was trying. I will try. I shall in the meantime try. I sometimes have tried. I shall still by that time be trying.