Home > Work > A Poetry Handbook

A Poetry Handbook QUOTES

A Poetry Handbook QUOTES

1 " Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. "

― Mary Oliver , A Poetry Handbook

2 " But very little of it can do more
than start you on your way to the real, unimaginably
difficult goal of writing memorably. That work is done
slowly and in solitude, and it is as improbable as carrying
water in a sieve. "

― Mary Oliver , A Poetry Handbook

3 " If it is...not just one's own accomplishment that carries one from this green and mortal world--that lifts the latch and gives a glimpse into a greater paradise--then perhaps one has the sensibility: a gratitude apart from authorship, a fervor and desire beyond the margins of the self. "

― Mary Oliver , A Poetry Handbook

4 " In looking for poems and poets, don't dwell on the boundaries of style, or time, or even of countries and cultures. Think of yourself rather as one member of a single, recognizable tribe. Expect to understand poems of other eras and other cultures. Expect to feel intimate with the distant voice. The differences you will find between then and now are interesting. They are not profound. (p. 11) "

― Mary Oliver , A Poetry Handbook

5 " But, to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers. Perhaps they are the only teachers. I would go so far as to say that, if one must make a choice between reading or taking part in a workshop, one should read. "

― Mary Oliver , A Poetry Handbook

6 " One learns by thinking about writing, and by talking
about writing-but primarily through writing. "

― Mary Oliver , A Poetry Handbook

7 " But perhaps you would argue that, since you want to be a contemporary poet, you do not want to be too much under the influence of what is old, attaching to the term the idea that old is old hat-out-of-date. You imagine you should surround yourself with the modern only. It is an error. The truly contemporary creative force is something that is built out of the past; but with a difference. Most of what calls itself contemporary is built, whether it knows it or not, out of a desire to be liked. It is created in imitation of what already exists and is already admired. There is, in other words, nothing new about it. To be contemporary is to rise through the stack of the past, like the fire through the mountain. Only a heat so deeply and intelligently born can carry a new idea into the air. "

― Mary Oliver , A Poetry Handbook

8 " You would learn very little in this world if you were not allowed to imitate. And to repeat your imitations until some solid grounding in the skill was achieved and the slight but wonderful difference-that made you you and no one else-could assert itself. Every child is encouraged to imitate. But in the world of writing it is originality that is sought out, and praised, while imitation is the sin of sins. Too bad. I think if imitation were encouraged much would be learned well that is now learned partially and haphazardly. Before we can be poets, we must practice; imitation is a very good way of investigating the real thing. "

― Mary Oliver , A Poetry Handbook

9 " These days many poets live in cities, or at least in
suburbs, and the natural world grows ever more distant from our everyday lives. Most people, in fact, live in cities, and therefore most readers are not necessarily very familiar with the natural world. And yet the natural world has always been the great warehouse of symbolic imagery. Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. "

― Mary Oliver , A Poetry Handbook

10 " The poet must not only write the poem but must scrutinize the world intensely, or anyway that part of the world he or she has taken for subject. If the poem is thin, it is likely so not because the poet does not know enough words, but because he or she has not stood long enough among the flowers--has not seen them in any fresh, exciting, and valid way. "

― Mary Oliver , A Poetry Handbook

11 " I cherish two sentences and keep them close to my desk. The first is by Flaubert. I came upon it among Van Gough's letters. It says, simply, 'Talent is long patience, and originality an effort of will and of intense observation. "

― Mary Oliver , A Poetry Handbook

12 " Invention hovers always a little above the rules. "

― Mary Oliver , A Poetry Handbook

13 " The language of the poem is the language of particulars. "

― Mary Oliver , A Poetry Handbook

14 " It is no use thinking that writing of poems – the actual writing – can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude. "

― Mary Oliver , A Poetry Handbook

15 " Poems must, of course, be written in emotional freedom. Moreover, poems are not language but the content of the language. "

― Mary Oliver , A Poetry Handbook

16 " To be contemporary is to rise through the stack of the past, like the fire through the mountain. Only a heat so deeply and intelligently born can carry a new idea into the air. "

― Mary Oliver , A Poetry Handbook

17 " The subjects that stir the heart are not so many, after all, and they do not change. "

― Mary Oliver , A Poetry Handbook

18 " This I have always known - that if I did not live my life immersed in the one activity which suits me, and which also, to tell the truth, keeps me utterly happy and intrigued, I would come someday to bitter and mortal regret. "

― Mary Oliver , A Poetry Handbook

19 " ...from Emerson's journals. In the context, it is written in the past tense; changing the verb to present tense it reads: The poem is a confession of faith. Which is to say, the poem is not an exercise. It is not 'wordplay.' Whatever skill or beauty it has, in contains something beyond language devices, and has a purpose other than itself. "

― Mary Oliver , A Poetry Handbook

20 " Every adjective and adverb is worth five cents. Every verb is worth fifty cents "

― Mary Oliver , A Poetry Handbook