Quotes from Mary Jo Bang

I say every dog looks like no otherbut that isn't true. Not entirely.Difference is slippery.

The wheel begins its only if turning. / It had never stopped. / This is life's bargain that motion / Is hope.

A child, then a man, now a feather / Passing through a furious fire / Called time.

What is desire but the hard wire argument given to the mind's unstoppable mouth

The relief of giving in to destruction.

You were. You are The brightest thing in the shop window And the most beautiful seldom I ever saw

T. S. Eliot taught us you can write about your nervous breakdown, but call it 'The Wasteland' and make it big and crazy enough to hide behind.

What is desire but the hard wire argument given to the mind's unstoppable mouth

I say every dog looks like no other but that isn't true. Not entirely. Difference is slippery.

Yes, she's electric and yes, she's a monster at times.

Hoarding and wasting kept them out of Heaven And brought them to this barroom brawl; I won't try to prettify it with words.

Now I predict the future / merely by listening to echoes. A slamming door / can tell you everything you need to know. It's not a trick / only a simple matter of wisdom, an obsessive attention / to dreams. — Mary Jo Bang, from "The Oracle," Apology for Want: Poems . (Middlebury; 1st edition July 15, 1997)

Little idiosyncratic expressions can form A sense of who one is. Who one was. One can, hypothetically, be brought back In the form of an actor Who gives an after the fact replication Of text conveyed in a character's voice. I can no more understand the world as a stage Of myself, mired as I am, In this missing.

This is the bread: body, soul, exquisite tenderness. We are all we have. — Mary Jo Bang, from "Café Edgar," Apology for Want (University Press of New England, 1997)