Quotes from Frank Bidart

To make a film you have to dream a film... that's true of poetry as well.

Earth you know is round but seems flat. // You can't trust / your senses.

then the voice in my head said WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS REVOLT AGAINST IT WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE

God said: GOD MADE YOU. GOD DOES NOT CARE IF YOU ARE "GUILTY" OR NOT. I said: I CARE IF I AM GUILTY! I CARE IF I AM GUILTY!... God was silent. Everything was SILENT.

We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them change them and are changed.

drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnal round, the monotonous sorrow of the finite, within I am awake repairing in dirt the frayed immaculate thread forced by being to watch the birth of suns

I'm not a fool, I knew from the beginning what couldn't happen. What couldn't happen didn't. The enterprise is abandoned. But half our life is dreams, delirium, everything that underlies that feeds that keeps alive the illusion of sanity, semi- sanity, we allow others to see. The half of me that feeds the rest is in mourning. Mourns. Each time we must mourn, we fear this is the final mourning, this time mourning never will lift.

Understand that when the beast within you succeeds again in paralyzing into unending incompletion whatever you again had the temerity to try to make its triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of its rectitude. It knows that it alone knows you.

What takes place in me stays there.

But being is making; not only large things, a family, a book, a business; but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between friends, a meal.

We live in a hell of opinions.

Song You know that it is there, lair where the bear ceases for a time even to exist. Crawl in. You have at last killed enough and eaten enough to be fat enough to cease for a time to exist. Crawl in. It takes talent to live at night, and scorning others you had that talent, but now you sniff the season when you must cease to exist. Crawl in. Whatever for good or ill grows within you needs you for a time to cease to exist. It is not raining inside tonight. You know that it is there. Crawl in.

The law is that you must live in the house you have built. The law is absurd: it is written down nowhere. You are uncertain what crime is, though each life writhing to elude what it has made feels like punishment.

The love I've known is the love of two people staring not at each other, but in the same direction.

Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves.

The stratagems by which briefly you ameliorated, even seemingly untwisted what still twists within you — you loved their taste and lay there on your side nursing like a puppy.

up or down from the infinite C E N T E R B R I M M I N G at the winking rim of time the voice in my head said LOVE IS THE DISTANCE BETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVE

Though the body is its genesis, a poem is the vision of a process Out of ceaseless motion in edgeless space Carved in space, vision your poor eye's single armor against winter spring summer fall

1. Man is a MORAL animal. 2. You can get human beings to do anything — IF you convince them it is moral. 3. You can convince human beings anything is moral.

Poem on anorexic): The only way to escape the history of styles is not to have a body.

After sex & metaphysics,— … what? What you have made.

Wanting to be a movie star....answering an ad at ten or eleven. You made your mother drive you to Hollywood.

Couples stay together when each of the two remains a necessity for the other. which you cannot know, until they cease to be.

The gestures poems make are the same as the gestures of ritual injunction — curse; exorcism; prayer; underlying everything perhaps, the attempt to make someone or something live again. Both poet and shaman make a model that stands for the whole. Substitution, symbolic substitution. The mind conceives that something lived, or might live. Implicit is the demand to understand. The memorial that is ward and warning. Without these ancient springs poems are merely more words.