Home > Work > Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within
1 " 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
2 " Imagine a sentence as a hall with a series of doors. Each door is a possible way to use what you’ve already written to generate new material. "
3 " This is your genius: your own profound desire to write. Your love of words and language, your attempt to get to what poet Donald Hall called “the unsayable said.” If "
4 " Poems are what you make when you experience life in a certain way. Alive to yourself in the world, observant of inner and outer reality, and connected to language "
5 " Today I found a twenty in the red-lined pocket of my wool coat. There’s no twenty-dollar bill in the red lining of my uterus. "
6 " The truth is, life is difficult and intense. The beauty is that we have art and love to give us solace, and joy, a reason to live and a reason to care about what happens in, and to, the world. "
7 " Details convince; they persuade us that the writer has looked closely at the world, and they bring us close to the world the writer is creating. "
8 " Picasso said, “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth. "
9 " Beginning writers tend to think that craft is their enemy. As long as they believe that, they will remain beginners, no matter how many years they write. "
10 " Forget wondering, Am I good enough? Can I do this? The only thing you really need to ask yourself is: Is writing my genius? If it is, then apprentice yourself. "
11 " The artists who copied Rembrandt did so to learn about painting, not to be lesser versions of the master. They imitated as a way of looking closely, and then used what they had learned to develop their own work, brushstroke by brushstroke. Line by line, you can do the same. "
12 " Reading is like food to a writer; without it, the writer part of you will die—or become spindly and stunted. "
