10 More Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Dorianne Laux

“I try to avoid calling myself a poet because I think that’s something someone else has to call you. It’s like bragging.”

“I don’t know if we ever have enough distance to “see” our own trajectory. We’re in the muddled middle of it. Who knows what will last, what poems will take hold of the imaginations of the future.”

“The changes that have occurred in poetry have been minor when you look at it over the scale of human time. It’s like a rose, maybe a hybrid with color and size differentials, but the same genus, plucked from the same original blowsy family.”

“I write to invite the voices in, to watch the angel wrestle, to feel the devil gather on its haunches and rise. I write to hear myself breathing. I write to be doing something while I wait to be called to my appointment with death. I write to be done writing. I write because writing is fun.”

“Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn’t identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you’re the one that bleeds. You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn’t depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you’re any good.”

“Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.”

“I think what life experience has brought to my poems is compassion. When you work hard to make a living, raise a child up into the world, fail at marriage and try again, teach and fail, travel and fall, become ill, well again, weak but grateful, you learn patience, forbearance.”

“The more that accrues, the more depth, weight, and breadth we can bring to the poems, which we then need to throw overboard so we don’t sink.”

 “I don’t worry anymore about writing. There are times that I go through dry periods. I never go through a block. I’m always writing, but there are times where I’m just not on my game, and I’ll use that time to read some new poets, go see some art, walk down to the river and just stare at it, or have a conversation with my sister, or whatever – do whatever it is that I do in my life, hoping that I’ll get filled up enough. And something will happen, some juggling will happen and boom.”

“I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live. I know the life I could have lived without it. Both on the physical plain, and the soul plain. Poetry helps us endure.”

–Dorianne Laux