C.D. Wright > Quotes

“Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously written for a hermetic constituency; the bulk is written for the bourgeoisie, leaving a lean cut for labor. Only the hermetically aimed has a snowball's chance in hell of reaching its intended ears. One proceeds from this realization. A staggering figure of vibrant, intelligent people can and do live without poetry, especially without the poetry of their time. This figure includes the unemployed, the rank and file, the union brass, banker, scientist, lawyer, doctor, architect, pilot, and priest. It also includes most academics, most of the faculty of the humanities, most allegedly literary editors and most allegedly literary critics. They do so--go forward in their lives, toward their great reward, in an engulfing absence of poetry--without being perceived or perceiving themselves as hobbled or deficient in any significant way. It is nearly true, though I am often reminded of a Transtromer broadside I saw in a crummy office building in San Francisco:



We got dressed and showed the house

You live well the visitor said

The slum must be inside you.



If I wanted to understand a culture, my own for instance, and if I thought such an understanding were the basis for a lifelong inquiry, I would turn to poetry first. For it is my confirmed bias that the poets remain the most 'stunned by existence,' the most determined to redeem the world in words..”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“I am suggesting that the radical of poetry lies not in the
resolution of doubts but in their proliferation”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances.”
― C.D. Wright

“Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life.”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“Uniformity, in its motives, its goals, its far-ranging consequences, is the natural enemy of poetry, not to mention the enemy of trees, the soil, the exemplary life therein.”
― C.D. Wright

“If the incision of our words amounts to nothing but a feeling, a slow motion, it will still cut a better swath than the factory model, the corporate model, the penitentiary model, which by my lights are one and the same.”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“Readers have to be sought out and won to the light of the page, poem by poem, one by one by one.”
― C. D. Wright

“Poetry helps us to suffer more efficiently,”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile.”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“The son was in high school. He had a part-time job at a laundromat in a small disenchanting strip mall. He was reading Anna Karenina. He was three hundred– plus pages deep. Soap ’n’ Suds was almost never busy. The boss was scarce. The son could read. A young woman arrived with her wash, got change, and asked what he was reading. Anna Karenina. Oh, she said, is that the one where she throws herself on the rails at the end. Asshole, he muttered.”
― C.D. Wright, The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All

“Poetry is tribal not material. As such it lights the fire and keeps watch over the flame. Believe me, this is where you get warm again. And naked. This is where you can remember the good times along with the worst; where you are not allowed to forget the worst, else you cannot be healed.”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“The Ozarks are a fixture in my mindscape, but I didn't stay local in every respect. I always think of Miles Davis, "People who don't change end up like folk musicians playing in museums, local as a motherfucker." I wouldn't describe my attachment to home as ghostly, but long-distanced. My ear has been licked by many other tongues.”
― C. D. Wright

“Poetry and advertising (the basest mode of which is propaganda) are in direct and total opposition. If you do not use language you are used by it.”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“Lead me, guide me to the light of your paper. Keep me in your arc of acuity. And when the ream is spent. Write a poem on my back. I’ll never wash it off.”
― C.D. Wright, Deepstep Come Shining

“I believe the word used wrongly distorts the world.”
― C.D. Wright

“I like nouns that go up: loft. And ones that sink: mud. I like the ones that peck: chicken. And canter: canter. Those that comfort: flannel and pelt. Cell is an excellent word, in that it sweetly fulfills its assigned sound in a small, thin container. Unlike hell, which is disappointing. Overall. Wanting in force and fury. I like that a lone syllable names a necessary thing: bridge, house, door, food, bed. And the ones that sustain us: dirt, milk, and so on. What a thing, that a syllable — birth, time, space, death — points to the major mysteries with such simplicity, as with a silent finger. And to our very vital parts: head, snout, heart, butt. And our fundamental feeling: fear.”
― C.D. Wright, The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All

“If religion, she also liked to say, is the opiate of the masses, fundamentalism is the amphetamine.”
― C.D. Wright, One with Others: [a little book of her days]

“Writing is a risk and a trust. The best of it lies yonder.”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“Re: Happiness, in pursuit thereof"

It is 2005, just before landfall.
Here I am, a labyrinth, and I am a mess.
I am located at the corner of Waterway
and Bluff. I need your help. You will find me
to the left of the graveyard, where the trees
grow especially talkative at night,
where fog and alcohol rub off the edge.
We burn to make one another sing;
to stay the lake that it not boil, earth
not rock. We are running on Aztec time,
fifth and final cycle. Eyes switch on/off.
We would be mercurochrome to one another
bee balm or chamomile. We should be concrete,
glass, and spandex. We should be digital or,
at least, early. Be ivory-billed. Invisible
except to the most prepared observer.
We will be stardust. Ancient tailings
of nothing. Elapsed breath. No,
we must first be ice. Be nails. Be teeth.
Be lightning.”
― C.D. Wright, Rising, Falling, Hovering

“As in all callings, poetry secures a kind of ecstasis. There may be a wiser vantage, but we haven’t discovered one yet. Perception leads to further perception. Perceive. Perceive. “See what the grass would see if it had eyes,” writes Oppen.”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“Poets are mostly voters and taxpayers, but the alienation of the poet is a common theme. Among poets there are also probably higher than average rates of clutch burnout, job turnover, rooting about, sleep apnea, noncompliance, nervous leg syndrome, depression, litigation, black clothing, and so forth, but this is where we live, or as Leonard Cohen put it, poetry is the opiate of the poets.”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“We come from a country that has made a fetish if not a virtue out of proving it can live without art: high, low, old, new, fat, lean, and particularly the rarely visible nocturnal art of poetry.
We must do something with our time on this small aleatory sphere for motives other than money. Power is not an acceptable surrogate.”
― C. D. Wright

“it is not that complexity is overrated, but is is overcomplicated; it is not that obscurity is too obscure, it's that the underside grows grungy if it isn't exposed to the change of air;

it is not that the language is exhausted, it is that we run down; it's not that the edge won't cut anymore, it is that the cuts are getting thinner;

it's not that art is artificial, it is that the artists get outright seditty; it's not that literary reputations are not inevitable, it's that they are invented;

not that theories are not beautiful, but that they are feeble”
― C. D. Wright

“A girl sits out-of-doors in her slip./ She turns fourteen, twenty-eight, fifty-six,/ goes crazy.”
― C.D. Wright, Deepstep Come Shining