Quotes from Kim Addonizio

. . . All artists' work is autobiographical. Any writer's work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.

All artists' work is autobiographical. Any writer's work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.

Love me like a wrong turn on a bad road late at night.

Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.

Out there people are working and arguing and laughing, living their beautiful, terrible lives, falling in love and having babies and being bored out of their skulls and feeling depressed, then being consoled by some little thing like watching the patterns the light makes through the leaves of trees, casting shadows on the sidewalks. I remember the line from that poem now. Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Love's merciless, the way it travels in and keeps emitting light.

I'm so in love with you I can't stand up.

Imagine a sentence as a hall with a series of doors. Each door is a possible way to use what you've already written to generate new material.

Robert Frost said, "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

I want a red dress. I want it flimsy and cheap, I want it too tight, I want to wear it until someone tears it off me. I want it sleeveless and backless, this dress, so no one has to guess what's underneath.

For You For you I undress down to the sheaths of my nerves. I remove my jewelry and set it on the nightstand, I unhook my ribs, spread my lungs flat on a chair. I dissolve like a remedy in water, in wine. I spill without staining, and leave without stirring the air. I do it for love. For love, I disappear.

This is your genius: your own profound desire to write. Your love of words and language, your attempt to get to what poet Donald Hall called "the unsayable said." If

Poetry is an intimate act. It's about bringing forth something that's inside you—whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiritual. It's about making something, in language, which can be transmitted to others—not as information, or polemic, but as irreducible art.

Today I found a twenty in the red-lined pocket of my wool coat. There's no twenty-dollar bill in the red lining of my uterus.

To hell with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt and your tongue down my throat like an oxygen tube. Cover me in black plastic. Let the mourners through.

Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part or kiss anyway, let's start with that, with the kissing part, because it's better than the parting part

Louise Glück's Ararat dissects family relationships in starkly beautiful poems.

There's a great feeling of relief and catharsis when you manage to get something that's been buried or hidden out onto the page. And such a process, whether or not it eventually results in a poem, helps to integrate that part of the self.

Love's merciless, the way it travels in and keeps emitting light.

I'm so in love with you I can't stand up.

Love me like a wrong turn on a bad roadlate at night.

Today I want to resolve nothing. I only want to walk a little longer in the cold blessing of the rain, and lift my face to it..

I want to lie down somewhere and suffer from love until it nearly kills me, and then I wnat to get up again and put on that little black dress and wait for you, yes you, to come over here and get down on your knees and tell me just how fucking good I look

If your workshop praises a poem, don't think everyone is too nice to tell you how terrible it really is. (If it is that kind of workshop, you should get out of it as soon as possible—honest feedback is the sign that people respect your writing and take it seriously.)