"What poetry can, must, and will always do for us: it complicates us, it doesn’t ‘soothe.’"
"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."
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Source: Jorie Graham (1996). “The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems, 1974-1994”, Carcanet Press Limited
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"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 storm: I close my eyes and, standing in it, try to make it mine."
"Oh how we want to be taken and changed, want to be mended by what we enter."