Robert Kroetsch > Quotes

“Without writing, I sometimes suspect there would be no such thing as love.”
― Robert Kroetsch

“We can only re-tell stories; we attempt, in doing so, to tell new stories. Is there a way out of this bind? I think the trick is to enter into it completely. Avoid purity. The idea of perfection sounds awfully boring.”
― Robert Kroetsch

“If we have nothing to write about but nothing to write about, then that is what we have to write about.”
― Robert Kroetsch

“And sure enough, there it was,
not the sought-after needle, but,
to my agreeable astonishment,
the haystack in the field by the lane.”
― Robert Kroetsch, The Hornbooks of Rita K

“A loose generalization would have it that creation and destruction go hand in hand. But my destruction takes the form of trying to make an old story work, for instance having almost to destroy the old story to tell it anew. The Odyssey is an oldie. Which I try to tell on dry land, so to speak, in The Studhorse Man. You see, the old stories, instead of illuminating the world, sometimes stop us from seeing it. It's like a pair of glasses that don't quite fit any longer.”
― Robert Kroetsch

“You of the almighty zap,
Zeusifer, loose and zany,
let me sizzle on your throne
for maybe forty-eight seconds;
I've had enough of your poetry crap,
just give me the last word of this poem.”
― Robert Kroetsch, The Hornbooks of Rita K

“Finding a lover is a false start.
Fibrillations of the pitipat heart.
The search for truth is a bum steer.
It's much more likely we're looking for beer.
What can I possibly rhyme with mud?
Is "pod" close enough? Or "good"?
It is the sentence that (sometimes) thinks.
All the rest is twats and dinks.”
― Robert Kroetsch, The Hornbooks of Rita K

“Poet, if you can't grow up, at least grow down. Become a carrot, a parsnip. Even a potato. Let the earth conceal your shame. You mistook the mushrooms in your head for truth. Celebrate the actual beauty of mushrooms. Rejoice in their improbabilities. Accept the shortness of the season. Accept the shortness of your own breath. If you cannot suffer light, learn to engender the dark. The poem as hacking cough, as a croaking in the larynx, as a green discharge from blackened lungs. Poet, if you propose to make poems out of your halloween existence, you must learn to shit pumpkins.”
― Robert Kroetsch

“Attunement of one's feet to the bald and hairy earth.
Consider the blackbird, perched on a reed, a north wind
blowing, the water torn. Now is the poem's beginning,
even at this late hour in the span of everywhere. Consider
the lovers, with not enough arms for all their need to
embrace. Or, if you prefer, consider the madness of wars,
the impossible weight of oceans. And even if we had been
there, would we have laughed or cried?”
― Robert Kroetsch, The Hornbooks of Rita K

“A poem is an empty house.
[Stranger, you must enter, then knock.]”
― Robert Kroetsch, The Hornbooks of Rita K

“Ariel Gordon is superbly, supremely, a poet of the body. She finds words for the physicality of the forest, of the garden, of pregnancy. Hump speaks the erotics of being alive and being in love with being alive.”
― Robert Kroetsch