InteResting Unrest

Quotes uncovered while reading Dennis O’Driscoll’s Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry:


“I started a PhD in English at the University of Chicago because I loved poetry – which I now realize is like saying I studied vivisection because I loved dogs.”

— Michael Donaghy

“We are all interested in our own poems, just as we are interested in the smell of our own armpits, because they are uniquely redolent of ourselves. We are not, for converse reasons, much interested, as a rule, in the slapdash maunderings of other people.”

— editorial in The Spectator

“My self-esteem is so low that getting the Pulitzer Prize just made me break even.”

— Franz Wright

“There’s nothing like a punch in the mouth to remind you that that poem about your next-door neighbor was not as clever as you thought.”

— Simon Armitage

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"There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls."

— George Carlin

"Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music."

— George Carlin

Warning:
Objects in the mirror of your perception appear larger than they are in real life.

- me (from The Book of Warnings)

"I think that all poetry is essentially optimistic, in that to write a poem is a "creative" act, therefore life affirming. A poem – a good poem – takes some of the chaos of life and orders it, contains it for a moment.

"The poem strikes a note or a chord – when it works – with which the reader vibrates sympathetically. It is a positive force.

"To write a poem requires a great deal of optimism: to believe that you have something to say and that someone, somewhere, wants to hear what you have to say, and to believe that somehow that will make some kind of unspecified difference."

– Louis Jenkins

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bLessed Unrest

Agnes de Mille, in her Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham, precedes a great Martha Graham quotation this way:

"The greatest thing she ever said to me was in 1943 after the opening of Oklahoma!, when I suddenly had unexpected, flamboyant success for a work I thought was only fairly good, after years of neglect for work I thought was fine. I was bewildered and worried that my entire scale of values was untrustworthy. I talked to Martha. I remember the conversation well. It was in a Schrafft's restaurant, over a soda. I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be. Martha said to me, very quietly...

"'There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique.

'And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it.

'It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

'You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ...

'No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.' "



Also in that book is this:
"It was [American theater/scenic designer Robert Edmond] Jones who used to say to his classes, 'Some of you are doomed to be artists.' Martha picked up this phrase and used it many times thereafter. She also borrowed from him the phrase 'doom-eager,' which he had borrowed from Ibsen."