Home > Work > Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry
1 " One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent. "
― Stephen Dobyns , Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry
2 " Hesitancy is the surest destroyer of talent. One cannot be timorous and reticent, one must be original and loud. New metaphors, new rhythms, new expressions of emotion can only spring from unhindered gall. Nothing should interfere with that intuition--not the fear of appearing stupid, nor of offending somebody, nor jeopardizing publication, nor being trivial. The intuition must be as unhindered as a karate chop. "
3 " A work of art gives testimony to what it is to be a human being. It bears witness, it extracts meaning. A work of art is also the clearest nonphysical way that emotions is communicated from one human being to another. The emotion isn't referred to; it is re-created. The emotion shows us that our most private feelings are in fact shared feelings. And this offer us some relief from our existential isolation. (p: 10) "
4 " Talent isn’t enough. Determination, ambition, energy and gall are also needed, as well as the need to have one’s ego serve the writing and not the reverse. "
5 " The work of the poet as a vehicle of world harmony has a social character—this is, it is concerned with the doings of the poet’s fellow men, among whom he lives and whose fate he shares. He does not speak ‘for them’ but with them, nor does he set himself apart from them: otherwise he would not be a source of truth. "
6 " In order to maintain a capacity for astonishment, the poet can never anticipate the identity of the reader. Once the writer knows for whom he or she is writing, then the writer becomes too conscious of trying to influence that person and to interfere with the intuitive process. "
7 " Implicit in this is the conviction that the poem or piece of fiction is a made-thing. It is neither received from outside or erupts out of the artist’s peculiar sensitivity and superiority. "
8 " if falsehood is your nature, then only by falsehood can you be true. "
9 " At some level the subject of any story or poem is always the reader, and the writer who ignores this does so at his or her peril. "
10 " When the form is more important than the content, when it exists to convince or dazzle or decorate or distract, then the form is not rising out of the needs of the content but is being used rhetorically; that is, to convince for its own sake. The eventual effect will be to frustrate us, because we are looking, ultimately, to be moved out of ourselves, to be able for a second to step away and see ourselves in relation to the world. "
