It's not that he lacked poetry. But his poetry was of the body, not the mind. He spoke it in the way he moved, the way he held a hammer, rowed a boat, built a fire. I, on the other hand, was like a brain in a box, a beating heart in a coal scuttle.
Fragrance is the voice of inanimate things.
If words had flavors, hers would be bitter almonds and coffee grounds.
If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst.
Appealing to the five senses is the feature that will always set writing apart from the visual media. A good writer will tell us what the world smells like, what the textures are, what the sounds are, what the light looks like, what the weather is.
Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is.
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
The being level speaks the language of art, music, color shape and pattern directly -- a language that requires no words -- is not limited by words -- nor does it have the specificity of words and thus cannot be broken onto parts that can be manipulated or analyzed by the intellect. It must be swallowed, whole not parsed, sorted and justified.
A word can be transformed into a coulour, light, a smell; it is the writer's task to use it in such a way that it serves, never fails, can never be ignored.
Writing is physical for me. I always have the sense that the words are coming out of my body, not just my mind.
Art after all is but an extension of language to the expression of sensations too subtle for words.
We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.
