Michael Naughton

“I, a stranger and afraid
In a world I never made.”
― A.E. Housman, Last Poems

“I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.”
― Philip Levine

“Oh, yes, let’s bless the imagination. It gives us the myths we live by. Let’s bless the visionary power of the human— the only animal that’s got it—, bless the exact image of your father dead and mine dead, bless the images that stalk the corners of our sight and will not let go.”
― Philip Levine, The Simple Truth: Poems

“Doubt makes a man decent.”
― Harry Crews