Quotes from James Wright

Poetry can keep life itself alive. You can endure almost anything as long as you can sing about it.

Shake out the ruffle, turn and go,Over the trellis blow the kiss.Some of the guests will never knowAnother night to shadow this.Some of the birds awake in vinesWill never see another faceSo frail, so lovely anyplaceBetween the birdbath and the bines.

I will putter as though I had not heard,And lift him into my arms and singWhether he hears my song or not.

I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.I have wasted my life.

Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom.

The Jewel There is this cave In the air behind my body That nobody is going to touch: A cloister, a silence Closing around a blossom of fire. When I stand upright in the wind, My bones turn to dark emeralds.

In a pine tree, A few yards away from my window sill, A brilliant blue jay is springing up and down, up and down, On a branch. I laugh, as I see him abandon himself To entire delight, for he knows as well as I do That the branch will not break.

Look: I am nothing. I do not even have ashes to rub into my eyes.

It goes without saying that a fine short poem can have the resonance and depth of an entire novel.

And then, when noon comes, Each stranger Has no room left in the light Except for only his hands. Here are mine. They are kind of skinny. May I have your lovely trees?

But I have burned already down to bone. There is a fire that burns beyond the names Of sludge and filth of which this world is made. Agony sears the dark flesh of the body, And lifts me higher than the smoke, to rise Above the earth, above the sacrifice; Until my soul flares outward like a blue Blossom of gas fire dancing in mid-air: Free of the body's work of twisted iron.

We choose exile as a vantage point; from exile we look back on the rejected

Love is a cliff, A clear, cold curve of stone, mottled by stars, Smirched by the morning, carved by the dark sea Till stars and dawn and waves can slash no more, Till the rock's heart is found and shaped again.

Across the road, tadpoles are dancing on the quarter thumbnail of the moon. They cant see, not yet.

I would rather live my life than not live it.

Good evening charlie, yes I know you rise, two lean grey spiders drifting through your eyes.

Beginning The moon drops one or two feathers into the field. The dark wheat listens. Be still. Now. There they are, the moons young, trying Their wings. Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone Wholly, into the air. I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe Or move. I listen. The wheat leans back toward its own darkness, And I lean toward mine.

In the Shreve High football stadium, I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood, And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel, Dreaming of heroes.

Give winter nothing; hold; and let the flake Poise or dissolve along your upheld arms. All flawless hexagons may melt and break; While you must feel the summer's rage of fire, Beyond this frigid season's empty storms. Banished to bloom, and bear the birds' desire.

I'll be damned, you're a poet. Welcome to hell.

I have torn myself out of many bitter places In America, that seemed Tall and green-rooted in mid-noon.

because writing is not only music. It is also architecture, demanding the technique, mastered only after months and years of bitterest labor, which that art possesses---if the architect is to construct a cathedral of merit instead of a mere group of disordered, flimsy outhouses.

One of the results of this has been that American culture increasingly defined those who served as "heroic," a term derived from the act of service rather than any specific circumstance or performance during that service.

I asked the Mesquite coach who he thought the best team in Mesquite is. He said they were about even.