me or the beam

Most poets want to tell their own stories while a few want to illuminate the world.

my life

So many poets who think their life stories are important.

stay alive

We tell each other stories to help each other live. That’s why I read poetry. I read poetry to stay alive. That’s why I went to poetry in the first place, that’s why I stay with it, that’s why I’ll never leave it. Because poetry alone carries the truth of “is-ness.”

—Marie Howe, BOMB 61, Fall 1997, interview by Victoria Redel.

used to these stories

“Remember the pears, they were so green,

and the avocados, like guitars, honey-golden, and

the asparagus, like a lion’s rainy mane, and…”

Our mouths water. Their mouths water,

I am used to these stories. I am used to the land

barren, bitten and aflame with lies. I am used to

our faces in this new wild dispassionate light.

I learned this from my musician friends, from

years waging futile wars with poetry until

I could no longer think of anything else.

—Juan Felipe Herrera, “I Walk Back Nowhere,” Half of the World in Light (Univ. of Arizona Press, 2008)

broken pieces

As we manipulate everyday words, we forget that they are fragments of ancient and eternal stories, that we are building our houses with broken pieces of sculptures and ruined statues of gods as the barbarians did.

—Bruno Schulz's "Letters and Other Writings," Regions of the Great Heresy: Bruno Schulz, a Biographical Portrait (Norton, 2002) by Jerzy Ficowski, translated by Theodosia Robertson.

See Art of Bruno Schulz.

narrative coming through

Certain stories are instant poetry: The words must simply get out of the way of the telling.