I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs.
I can't go on flying apart just for those who want the benefit of a few verbal kicks. My God, do you know what poems like that cost? They're not written vicariously: they come out of actual suffering, real madness.
If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both-you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart to the despairing intellect.
Pain is filtered in a poem so that it becomes finally, in the end, pleasure.
Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.
It is one of the prodigious privileges of art that the horrific, artistically expressed, becomes beauty, and that sorrow, given rhythm and cadence, fills the spirit with a calm joy.
As things get worse, poetry gets better because it becomes more necessary.
Time sped. And the poet through sorrow Became like his suffering kind. Again he toiled over his poems To lighten the grief of his mind.
What is it precisely, that feeling of 'returning' from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger - then it fades, but never completely.
None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.
If you're angry, you don't have to write a poem dealing with the cause of your anger. But it needs to be an angry poem. So go ahead... write one. I know you're at least a little bit angry with me. And when you're done with your poem, decipher it as if you'd just found it printed in a textbook and know absolutely nothing about its author. The results can be amazing...and scary. But it's always cheaper than a therapist.
