Quotes from Jorie Graham

What poetry can, must, and will always do for us: it complicates us, it doesn't 'soothe.'

If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice.

I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it.

huge breath-held, candle-lit, whistling, planet-wide, still blood-flowing, howling-silent, sentence-driven, last-bridge-pulled-up-behind city of the human...

Now listen for the pines, the bloom, its glittering, the wild hacking of sea, bend in each stream, eddy of bend—listen—hear all skins raveling, unending—hear one skin clamp down upon what now is no longer missing. Here you are says a voice in the light, the trapped light. Be happy.

The end of the world had already occurred. How long ago was that. I don't know. It is not a function of knowledge. It is in a special sense that the world ends. You have to keep living.

Accelerate. Immediate. Be incessant. Be disindividuated.

Today I am getting my instructions. I am getting them from something holy.

This is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing is to be pure. What you get is to be changed.

love / is turning out the lights when others do, a curfew we / would take / for sails.

There is a feeling the body gives the mind of having missed something, a bedrock poverty, like falling without the sense that you are passing through one world, that you could reach another anytime. Instead the real is crossing you, your body an arrival you know is false but can't outrun. And somewhere in between these geese forever entering and these spiders turning back, this astonishing delay, the everyday, takes place.

Towards the end of the season it is not bad to have the body. To have experienced joy as the mere lifting of hunger is not to have known it less.

Touch pain with great curiosity.

Low tide, free day, nothing being memorialized here today—memories float, yes, over the place but not memories any of us now among the living possess—open your hands—...to take up whatever it is the spirit must take up, & what is the melody of that, the sustained one note of obligatory hope, taken in...

May I break your even weave, loosen your knot, and if i break you are you mine?

and angle of vision, dust, gravity, solitude, and the part of the law which is the world's waiting and the part of the law which is my waiting, and the part which is my impatience—now; now?— though there are, there really are things in the world, you must believe me.

that we be founded on infinite smallness

One day: stronger wind than anyone expected. Stronger than ever before in the recording of such. Unnatural says the news. Also the body says it.

The permanent is ebbing. Is leaving nothing in the way of trails, they are blown over, grasses shoot up, life disturbing life…

Consider the body of the ocean which rises every instant into me, & its ancient evaporation, & how it delivers itself to me, how the world is our law, this indrifting of us into us, a chorusing in us of elements, & how the intermingling of us lacks intelligence, makes reverberation, syllables untranscribable, inclingings, & how wonder is also what pours from us…

stilling—very still—breathing into this oxygen which also pockets my looking hard, just that, takes it in, also my thinking which I try to seal off, my humanity, I was not a mistake is what my humanity thinks, I cannot go somewhere else than this body…

Waning moon. Rising now. Creak, it goes. Deep over the exhausted continents. I wonder says my fullness. Nobody nobody says the room in which I lie very still in the darkness watching. Your heart says the moon, waning & rising further. Where is it. Your keep, your eyes your trigger finger your spine your reasoning—

when will we open them again our eyes, this must all be from the world of shut eyes, one's temples feel the cold, maybe one is inside a seashell, one is what another force is hearing—how lovely, we are being handed over to another force, listen, put this to your ear—the last river we know loses its form, widens, as if a foot were lifted from the dancefloor but not put down again, ever…

Summer heat, the first early morning of it…step out and suddenly notice this: summer arrives, has arrived, is arriving. Birds grow less than leaves although they cheep, dip, arc.