Quotes from Pattiann Rogers

One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.

I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems.

Poetry uses language to create a music borne inside human experiences and emotions.

To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.

Poetry doesn't function by saying things straightforwardly because the language is too imprecise, too limited often, to address the underlying subject of most poems.

Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.

Poetry is so close to music, not just in cadence and sound but in silences. That's why, to me, I can't talk about prose poems. I can talk about poetic prose.

Sometimes, as in an athletic event where everything clicks, inexplicable things do happen. Learning and practicing an art or a skill has always been part of the success of the goal.

I've spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem - could become a poem.

I love the language. I'm just totally fascinated by the sound and the look of words and the kinds of cadences you can create with them, the various kinds of music.

I do love writing prose interspersed with the poetry of other people. Their rhythms break into my prose and create a connection.

My object when writing prose is to write as clearly as possible. I think I know what I'm saying in prose, and I want others to understand it and to be able to restate it.

If I'm excited by something bodily, and curious about it, I generally want to delve into it and explore it with poetry. That's the way I ordinarily watch the world around me.

The silences express so much and are so crucial in music, and prose does not allow for the creation of these silences, these white spaces on the page or the computer screen.

I think parts of my soul have been saved by my writing, not in the sense of escaping death, but escaping the death of the moment, perhaps.

Mothers,fathers,our kind,tell me again that death doesn't matter.Tell me it's just a limitation of vision ,a fold of landscape,a deep flax-and-poppy-filled gully hidden on the hill, pleat in our perception a somersault of existence,natural,even beneficent even a gift,the only key to the red-lacquered door at the end of the hall,"water within water," those old stories.

Don't you know This is precisely what I seek, mad myself To envelope every last drupe and pearl shaped ovule, Every nip and cry and needle-fine boring, every drooping, Spore-rich tassle of oak flower, all the whistling, Wing-beating, heavy-tipped matings of an entire prairie Of grasses, every wafted, moaning seed hook You can possibly manage to bring to me, That is exactly what I contrive to take you into my arms With you, again and again.

sleep, without sound of itself, is the engendering space of sound.