Mary Karr Quotes

A good poem is an amazing thing: a perfectly distilled, articulate moment. It opens you up - sometimes slowly, like the blooming of a flower, and sometimes with a quick knife-slice.

All that is literature seeks to communicate power

But writing poems and letters doesn't seem to do much good.

Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.

. . . it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are-until the poem-nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

It's hard to make music knowing that it's not going to be received by the listener in the way that it should be.

Poets will never be the highest-paid writers in the world. Instead, poetry will go on cutting a hand-made path through the mass-market insanity. For me, anyway, that path is the one that leads to the Chapel of the Grail.

Music gets us in touch with our emotions in a way that's more intimate than any other art form.

Thus poetry, regarded as a vehicle of thought, is especially impressive partly because it obeys all the laws of effective speech, and partly because in so doing it imitates the natural utterances of excitement.

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem - whether it's the music or some other element of it - that just seems to access another part of the brain. You know, Charles Olson talks about this transfer of energy that happens between the writer and the reader of the poem. I guess there's something essential to me about acknowledging upfront the immensity of it - the difficulty of it - and even allowing that to be the subject.

A good poem is like a bouillon cube. It's concentrated and it nourishes you when you need it.

Books, we are told, propose to instruct or to amuse. Indeed! A true antithesis to knowledge, in this case, is not pleasure, but power. All that is literature seeks to communicate power; all that is not literature, to communicate knowledge.

The poem is in my hands, and can run stories through her hands.

Poetry is news brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.

Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.

In contrast to a dream a reverie cannot be recounted. To be communicated, it must be written, written with emotion and taste, being relived all the more strongly because it is being written down. Here, we are touching the realm of written love. It is going out of fashion, but the benefits remain. There are still souls for whom love is the contact of two poetries, the fusion of two reveries.

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word, a verse, and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem.

The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.

A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.

Storytelling with music is a really powerful device.