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Kim Addonizio QUOTES

Kim Addonizio QUOTES

1 " . . . All artists’ work is autobiographical. Any writer’s work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them. "

― Kim Addonizio

2 " Love me like a wrong turn on a bad road
late at night. "

― Kim Addonizio

3 " Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds. "

― Kim Addonizio , The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry

4 " We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it. "

― Kim Addonizio , The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry

5 " Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck. "

― Kim Addonizio , Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within

6 " Poetry is an intimate act. It's about bringing forth something that's inside you--whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiritual. It's about making something, in language, which can be transmitted to others--not as information, or polemic, but as irreducible art. "

― Kim Addonizio , The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry

7 " Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question. "

― Kim Addonizio , The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry

8 " Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's. "

― Kim Addonizio , The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry

9 " Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won't magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them -- consciously and unconsciously -- your style will develop. "

― Kim Addonizio , The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry

10 " I'm so in love with you I can't stand up. "

― Kim Addonizio

11 " And finally
the glass that contains and spills this stuff continually
while the drinker hunches before it, while the bartender gathers
up empties, gives back the drinker's own face. Who knows what it looks like;
who cares whether or not it was young once, or ever lovely,
who gives a shit about some drunk rising to stagger toward
the bathroom, some man or woman or even lost
angel who recklessly threw it all over—heaven, the ether,
the celestial works—and said, Fuck it, I want to be human? "

― Kim Addonizio

12 " Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best;
and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal
surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries,
or cherries, the rich spurt in the back
of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing.
Give me the lover who yanks open the door
of his house and presses me to the wall
in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I’m drenched
and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload
and begin their delicious diaspora
through the cities and small towns of my body.
To hell with the saints, with martyrs
of my childhood meant to instruct me
in the power of endurance and faith,
to hell with the next world and its pallid angels
swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.
I want this world. I want to walk into
the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along
like I’m nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass,
and I want to resist it. I want to go
staggering and flailing my way
through the bars and back rooms,
through the gleaming hotels and weedy
lots of abandoned sunflowers and the parks
where dogs are let off their leashes
in spite of the signs, where they sniff each
other and roll together in the grass, I want to
lie down somewhere and suffer for love until
it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again
and put on that little black dress and wait
for you, yes you, to come over here
and get down on your knees and tell me
just how fucking good I look.
- “For Desire "

― Kim Addonizio

13 " The truth is that writing is simply not reliable. You can't count on it to be there just because you've made some space for it. In fact, making space might make it disappear. You tell yourself you can't write in the middle of your daily life, with all its distractions and commitments, and when you finally clear the decks, light off for someplace scenic or at least private, you sit there completely paralyzed. You have devoted yourself to writing, but it has not returned your devotion. If writing were a person, you would be in an abusive relationship. The healthy thing to do would be to get a restraining order and shut it right out of your heart. "

― Kim Addonizio , Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life

14 " You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good. "

― Kim Addonizio , The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry

15 " Two roads diverge in a yellow wood,' I think. It didn't ultimately matter which one you took; that was the real point of Frost's poem. The roads were pretty much the same. That stuff about the one less traveled making all the difference was bullshit. "

― Kim Addonizio , Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life

16 " There's a great feeling of relief and catharsis when you manage to get something that's been buried or hidden out onto the page. And such a process, whether or not it eventually results in a poem, helps to integrate that part of the self. "

― Kim Addonizio , The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry

17 " Though now that I think about it, the workshop that day was probably focused on revision, as in Your First Draft Sucks and You Have a Thousand Do-Overs Before You Get It Right. Think of it this way: Build a city, then blow it up to save it. Invent a road to take you far out of town, then start over with one good brick. "

― Kim Addonizio , Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life

18 " Writing a novel is like having a baby. I know because I've had both, and the experiences were hellish. By comparison, the torture of the damned—plunged into excrement, boiled in blood, beheaded, set upon by harpies—are like love nips from your yippy little dog. "

― Kim Addonizio , Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life

19 " I walk into Summerville and no matter what my mood is it instantly drops about thirty degrees. "

― Kim Addonizio , Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life

20 " To write without any awareness of a tradition you are trying to become a part of would be self-defeating. Every artist alive responds to the history of his or her art—borrowing, stealing, rebelling against, and building on what other artists have done. "

― Kim Addonizio , The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry