Quotes from Dorianne Laux

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won't.

I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live. I know the life I could have lived without it. Both on the physical plain, and the soul plain. Poetry helps us endure.

I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I'm writing about those actual, factual experiences or not.

That's how it is sometimes--God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you're just too tired to open it.

I don't know if we ever have enough distance to "see" our own trajectory. We're in the muddled middle of it. Who knows what will last, what poems will take hold of the imaginations of the future.

Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us.

That's how it is sometimes-- God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you're just too tired to open it.

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

Moon In the Window I wish I could say I was the kind of child who watched the moon from her window, would turn toward it and wonder. I never wondered. I read. Dark signs that crawled toward the edge of the page. It took me years to grow a heart from paper and glue. All I had was a flashlight, bright as the moon, a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it.

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.

If trees could speak they wouldn't

Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won't magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them -- consciously and unconsciously -- your style will develop.

Death comes to me again, a girl in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling. It's not so terrible she tells me, not like you think, all darkness and silence. There are windchimes and the smell of lemons, some days it rains, but more often the air is dry and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase built from hair and bone and listen to the voices of the living. I like it, she says, shaking the dust from her hair, especially when they fight, and when they sing.

How many losses does it take to stop a heart, to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire?

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won't.

They are savage for knowledge, for beauty and truth. They crawl on their knees to find it.

How not to imagine the tumors ripening beneath his skin, flesh I have kissed, stroked with my fingertips, pressed my belly and breasts against, some nights so hard I thought I could enter him, open his back at the spine like a door or a curtain and slip in like a small fish between his ribs, nudge the coral of his brains with my lips, brushing over the blue coil of his bowels with the fluted silk of my tail.

And oh, the oh my nape of the neck. The up-swept oh my nape of the neck. I could walk behind anyone and fall in love. Don't stop. Don't turn around.

Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.

To write without any awareness of a tradition you are trying to become a part of would be self-defeating. Every artist alive responds to the history of his or her art—borrowing, stealing, rebelling against, and building on what other artists have done.

A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world.

You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good.

You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake, ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs window. (from "Antilamentation")