Quotes from Hayden Carruth

Why speak of the use of poetry? Poetry is what uses us.

My poems, I think, exist in a state of tension between the love of natural beauty and the fear of natural meaninglessness or absurdity.

Now I am almost entirely love.

Why speak of the use of poetry? Poetry is what uses us.

A poem is not an expression, nor it is an object. Yet it somewhat partakes of both. What a poem is Is never to be known, for which I have learned to be grateful.

The eye has knowledge the mind cannot share

many paths in the forest have chosen me. I go on any.

For your love given ask no return, none. To love you must love to love.

Language not urged and crammed with love is nothing, while that which is is everything.

Indeed poetry is bounded by silence on all sides, is almost defined by silence. from "Fallacies of Silence

The mind of man, which he did not ask to be given, demands a reason and a meaning--this is its self-defining cause--and yet it finds itself int he midst of a radically meaningless existence. The result: impasse. And nausea.

The past is nothing and we are in love with it.