Quotes from C.D. Wright

I am suggesting that the radical of poetry lies not in the resolution of doubts but in their proliferation

Poetry is a necessity of life.

Everyone in their car needs love.

Uniformity, in its motives, its goals, its far-ranging consequences, is the natural enemy of poetry, not to mention the enemy of trees, the soil, the exemplary life therein.

Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.

I am suggesting that the radical of poetry lies not in the resolution of doubts but in their proliferation

Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances.

Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life.

Uniformity, in its motives, its goals, its far-ranging consequences, is the natural enemy of poetry, not to mention the enemy of trees, the soil, the exemplary life therein.

If the incision of our words amounts to nothing but a feeling, a slow motion, it will still cut a better swath than the factory model, the corporate model, the penitentiary model, which by my lights are one and the same.

The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile.

Poetry is tribal not material. As such it lights the fire and keeps watch over the flame. Believe me, this is where you get warm again. And naked. This is where you can remember the good times along with the worst; where you are not allowed to forget the worst, else you cannot be healed.

Poetry and advertising (the basest mode of which is propaganda) are in direct and total opposition. If you do not use language you are used by it.

If religion, she also liked to say, is the opiate of the masses, fundamentalism is the amphetamine.

The son was in high school. He had a part-time job at a laundromat in a small disenchanting strip mall. He was reading Anna Karenina. He was three hundred– plus pages deep. Soap 'n' Suds was almost never busy. The boss was scarce. The son could read. A young woman arrived with her wash, got change, and asked what he was reading. Anna Karenina. Oh, she said, is that the one where she throws herself on the rails at the end. Asshole, he muttered.

Poetry helps us to suffer more efficiently

Lead me, guide me to the light of your paper. Keep me in your arc of acuity. And when the ream is spent. Write a poem on my back. I'll never wash it off.

I believe the word used wrongly distorts the world.

Writing is a risk and a trust. The best of it lies yonder.

Poets are mostly voters and taxpayers, but the alienation of the poet is a common theme. Among poets there are also probably higher than average rates of clutch burnout, job turnover, rooting about, sleep apnea, noncompliance, nervous leg syndrome, depression, litigation, black clothing, and so forth, but this is where we live, or as Leonard Cohen put it, poetry is the opiate of the poets.

As in all callings, poetry secures a kind of ecstasis. There may be a wiser vantage, but we haven't discovered one yet. Perception leads to further perception. Perceive. Perceive. "See what the grass would see if it had eyes," writes Oppen.