Samuel R. Delany Quotes

What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.

Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.

We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others.

An artist wears his work in place of wounds.

The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading.

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

Oh, I'm a pretty bad poet. This has been corroborated by others.

I don't know if younger poets read a lot of, you know, the poets - the established poets. There was a lot of pretty boring stuff to sort of put up with and to add to, to make something vital from.

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

I was a mess my freshman year of college. I still had so much pain in my heart.

The pain shows you what's left to investigate.

Today in my heart a vague trembling of stars and all roses are as white as my pain.

Where bright imagination reigns, the fine-wrought spirit feels acuter pains.

Scars crossed her welded wrists.

I think the songs I was writing after Aeroplane were full of a lot of undealt-with pain that was just a little too big... the issues seemed too large for me to confront intuitively through songwriting. I kept pushing it and pushing it. There are so many issues about being human and why people inflict pain on each other. There were seeds of all these things I hadn't dealt with. With just the personal issues, I felt I was in over my head, but then to write about it... To write you have to have at least a little bit of confidence you know what you're talking about.

You know what I do? I listen to other people, stumbling about with their half thoughts and half sentences and their clumsy feelings that they can't express, and it hurts me. So I go home and burnish it and polish it and weld it to a rhythmic frame, make the dull colors gleam, mute the garish artificiality to pastels, so it doesn't hurt any more: that's my poem. I know what they want to say, and I say it for them.

What hurts us is what heals us.

If you bury the pain deep down it will stay with you indefinitely, but if you open yourself to it, experience it, and deal with it head-on, you'll find it begins to move on after a while.

Long live the car crash hearts Cry on the couch all the poets come to life Fix me in 45

I understand why she did all those things, but that doesn't mean we aren't still broken.

My heart is in my/ pocket. It is poems by Pierre Reverdy.

I rhyme… to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Perhaps if I make myself write I shall find out what is wrong with me.

Her mind lives tidily, apart from cold and noise and pain. And bolts the door against her heart, out wailing in the rain.