Craig Morgan Teicher > Quotes

“Though it seems, at first, like an art of speaking, poetry is an art of listening.”
― Craig Morgan Teicher, We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress

“Most poets, in addition to being word fetishists, finally dedicate themselves to poetry -- or find themselves helplessly in its thrall -- in order to answer for something deeper and perhaps darker than their passion for words.”
― Craig Morgan Teicher, We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress

“Poets begin, ideally, in gladness, but often they begin in darker states -- poetry tends to arise as a way forward for those who have something to say that is painful and unutterable by other, more practical, more direct means.”
― Craig Morgan Teicher, We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress

“When poems are working, they are full of discoveries, thoughts poets didn't know they had, thoughts, perhaps, they hadn't had until that moment, which are encoded in the language itself, which poets have trained themselves to hear.”
― Craig Morgan Teicher, We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress

“Poets are word fetishists.”
― Craig Morgan Teicher, We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress

“death must be very precious
or else why carry it

all your life like an egg.”
― Craig Morgan Teicher, Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems

“A poet casts words into the ether to hear what words come back.”
― Craig Morgan Teicher, We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress

“Poetry is speech, cast in written language, that demands a response; it’s part of a conversation.”
― Craig Morgan Teicher

“[The poet] is the mouth through which [their] time is sung.”
― Craig Morgan Teicher, We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress

“[A] basic qualification for a poet [is] the ability to passionately hold two opposing feelings at once. Poets need ambivalence in order to acknowledge the unsayable and speak nonetheless.”
― Craig Morgan Teicher, We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress