Randall Jarrell Quotes

“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