Punk’s Reviews > Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose > Status Update

"To my mind, poets should discourage the practice of poetry, by example."

"A poem really has no beginning and end, although it does appear to. All the parts of a poem exist as a sort of plasma, simultaneously apprehended, existing in the mind all at once, as soon as we have become familiar with them."

Might have to read some Annie Dillard now. Recs?

Bounced hard off the two Marianne Moore essays, though I can see her influence on Ryan's own poetry.

"A virtue of poetry is that a little goes a long way, and Marianne Moore's poetry is especially virtuous."

"There must be a crack in the poet of some sort. It has to be deep, privately potent, and unmendable--and the poet must forever try to mend it."

"Though a person may be absolutely destined to be a poet, the person doesn't altogether understand this at first. For a long time the person just feels silly."

"Like the photographs kept from childhood, our journals do not save but wipe away, or overlay, memory."

"[Emily] Dickinson terrain is hard on the brain suspension."

"The more I think about it, the more oppressed I feel--so many of us writing books of poetry, with or without arc. How in the world can I feel really, really special? No, I think poets should take the lesson of the great aromatic eucalyptus tree and poison the soil beneath us."