"What poetry can, must, and will always do for us: it complicates us, it doesn’t ‘soothe.’"
"It's very hard to look in a mirror and see anything which resembles what one feels one's self to be. I think that discomfort, that dislocation, disintegration - that raw lack of feeling whole - that dysmorphia - is a very good place, in this moment, to hunt for the kind of experience which really requires the means of poetry to be grasped or felt."
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Source: Source: therumpus.net
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More quotes by Jorie Graham
"I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it . Because there is, of course, always the desire, the hope, that they are not two separate worlds, sound and silence, but that they become each other, that only our hearing fails."
"A poem is a private story, after all, no matter how apparently public. The reader is always overhearing a confession."
"If there is anything I love most, in the poems I love, it is the audible braiding of that bravery, that essential empty-handedness, and that willingness to be taken by surprise, all in one voice."
"The primary function of the creative use of language - in our age - is to try to constantly restore words to their meanings, to keep the living tissue of responsibility alive."
"The storm: I close my eyes and, standing in it, try to make it mine."