Frank Bidart > Quotes

“God said: GOD MADE YOU. GOD DOES NOT CARE IF YOU ARE "GUILTY" OR NOT. I said: I CARE IF I AM GUILTY! I CARE IF I AM GUILTY!... God was silent. Everything was SILENT.”
― Frank Bidart, Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016

“then the voice in my head said

WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE

OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS
REVOLT AGAINST IT

WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE ”
― Frank Bidart, In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-1990

“1. Man is a MORAL animal.

2. You can get human beings to do anything — IF you convince them it is moral.

3. You can convince human beings anything is moral.”
― Frank Bidart, Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016

“We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them change them and are changed.”
― Frank Bidart, Desire: Poems

“drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnal
round, the monotonous sorrow of the finite,

within       I am awake

repairing in dirt the frayed immaculate thread
forced by being to watch the birth of suns”
― Frank Bidart, Star Dust

“The Old Man at the Wheel

Measured against the immeasurable
universe, no word you have spoken

brought light. Brought
light to what, as a child, you thought

too dark to be survived. By exorcism
you survived. By submission, then making.

You let all the parts of that thing you would
cut out of you enter your poem because

enacting there all its parts allowed you
the illusion you could cut it from your soul.

Dilemmas of choice given what cannot
change alone roused you to words.

As you grip the things that were young when
you were young, they crumble in your hand.

Now you must drive west, which in November
means driving directly into the sun.”
― Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival: Poems

“Understand that when the beast within you

succeeds again in paralyzing into unending

incompletion whatever you again had the temerity to
try to make

its triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of its

rectitude. It knows that it alone
knows you.”
― Frank Bidart, Star Dust

“I'm not a fool, I knew from the beginning
what couldn't happen. What couldn't happen

didn't. The enterprise is abandoned.

But half our life is
dreams, delirium, everything that underlies

that feeds

that keeps alive the illusion of sanity, semi-
sanity, we allow

others to see. The half of me that feeds the rest

is in mourning. Mourns. Each time we must
mourn, we fear this is the final mourning, this time

mourning never will lift.”
― Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog

“What takes place in me stays there.”
― Frank Bidart

“The love I've known is the love of
two people staring

not at each other, but in the same direction.”
― Frank Bidart, In the Western Night: Collected Poems, 1965-1990

“We live in a hell of opinions.”
― Frank Bidart

“The law is that you
must live

in the house you have built.

The law is absurd: it is
written down nowhere.

You are uncertain what crime

is, though each life writhing to
elude what it has made

feels like punishment.”
― Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival: Poems

“But being is making; not only large things, a family, a book, a business; but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between friends, a meal.”
― Frank Bidart

“Song


You know that it is there, lair
where the bear ceases
for a time even to exist.

Crawl in. You have at last killed
enough and eaten enough to be fat
enough to cease for a time to exist.

Crawl in. It takes talent to live at night, and scorning
others you had that talent, but now you sniff
the season when you must cease to exist.

Crawl in. Whatever for good or ill
grows within you needs
you for a time to cease to exist.

It is not raining inside
tonight. You know that it is there. Crawl in.”
― Frank Bidart, Star Dust

“Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves.”
― Frank Bidart, Star Dust

“…Then, I said to myself:

'HISTORY IS HUMAN NATURE—;

TO SAY I AM GUILTY

IS TO ACCEPT IMPLICATION

IN THE HUMAN RACE. . .'

—Now, for months and months,
I have found

ANOTHER MAN in me—;

HE is NOT me—; I

am afraid of him …”
― Frank Bidart, Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016

“The stratagems by which briefly you
ameliorated, even seemingly

untwisted what still twists within you —

you loved their taste and lay there
on your side

nursing like a puppy.”
― Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival: Poems

“so try as you will
you cannot make me feel
embarrassment

at what I find beautiful.”
― Frank Bidart, Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016

“up or down from the infinite C E N T E R
B R I M M I N G at the winking rim of time

the voice in my head said

LOVE IS THE DISTANCE
BETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVE”
― Frank Bidart

“After sex & metaphysics,—
… what?

What you have made.”
― Frank Bidart, Star Dust

“Though the body is its
genesis, a poem is the vision of a process

Out of ceaseless motion in edgeless space

Carved in space, vision your poor eye's single
armor against winter spring summer fall”
― Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival: Poems

“The gestures poems make are the same as the gestures of ritual injunction — curse; exorcism; prayer; underlying everything perhaps, the attempt to make someone or something live again. Both poet and shaman make a model that stands for the whole. Substitution, symbolic substitution. The mind conceives that something lived, or might live. Implicit is the demand to understand. The memorial that is ward and warning. Without these ancient springs poems are merely more words.”
― Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog

“Because you could not master whatever enmeshed you

you became its slave -

You learned this bitterly, early. In order not to become its slave

you had to become its master.

You became its master.

Even as master, of course, you remain its slave.”
― Frank Bidart, Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016

“Wanting to be a movie star....answering an ad at ten or eleven. You made your mother drive you to Hollywood.”
― Frank Bidart

“(Poem on anorexic): The only way to escape the history of styles is not to have a body.”
― Frank Bidart

“We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.”
― Frank Bidart

“The planet turns there without you, beautiful. Exiled by death you cannot touch it. Weird joy to watch postulates

lived out and discarded, something crowed inside us always craving to become something glistening outside us, the relentless planet

showing itself the logic of what is buried inside it. To love existence is to love what is indifferent to you

you think, as you watch it turn there, beautiful. World that can know itself only by world, soon it must colonize and infect the stars.

You are an hypothesis of flesh. What you will teach the stars is constant rage at the constant prospect of not-being.”
― Frank Bidart, Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016

“Horrible the fate of the advice-giver in our culture: to repeat oneself in a thousand contexts until death, or irrelevance.

            *

I abjure advice-giver.”
― Frank Bidart, Star Dust

“Couples stay together when each of the two remains
a necessity for the other.
which you cannot know, until they cease to be.”
― Frank Bidart, Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016

“Whether you love what you love
Or live in divided ceaseless revolt against it
What you love is your fate”
― Frank Bidart, Half-Light: Collected Poems 1965-2016