Paul Tran > Quotes

“I, after so much isolation, so much indifference, kept going

even if going meant only waiting, hovering in place. So far below, so far
away from the rest of life....”
― Paul Tran, All the Flowers Kneeling

“...an actualized poem requires the actualization, or radical transformation, of the poet - that a poem is the discovery and enactment of an emotional and psychological investigation into the vexed interiority of a speaker, that the interior is indeed political - and that every poem, every time, in some miraculous way, must be an argument about the making of poetry itself.”
― Paul Tran, All the Flowers Kneeling

“There is no truth. Only a version. Aversion. A verge. A vengeance.”
― Paul Tran, All the Flowers Kneeling

“Now I know what appears
as the motion of Heaven
is just the motion of Earth.

Not stars.
Not whatever I want.”
― Paul Tran

“I see not stars but their light reaching across the distance between us.”
― Paul Tran, All the Flowers Kneeling

“Who doesn’t know how
doubt lifts the hem of its nightgown

to reveal another inch of thigh
before the face of faith?”
― Paul Tran

“I asked why.
I asked how.
I asked if

I could survive knowing
that not everything has a reason,
that not everything is capable
of or interested in reason.”
― Paul Tran

“Every poem, for me, begins with a question I don’t have the answer to, and here, in ‘Hypothesis,’ the question is whether I could persist in a world where things—love, violence, pleasure, pain, joy, agony—occur at random. I didn’t think I could; I thought there had to be a reason for suffering, that my suffering made me special, but in writing this poem, I found that I suffer because I want my suffering to mean something. Pain is pain, the poet Randall Jarrell tells me, and I’m trying—I really am trying—to see the world for what it is and not what my heart needs it to be.”
― Paul Tran