Juliet > Juliet's Quotes

“Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“I am suggesting that the radical of poetry lies not in the
resolution of doubts but in their proliferation”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances.”
― C.D. Wright

“If the incision of our words amounts to nothing but a feeling, a slow motion, it will still cut a better swath than the factory model, the corporate model, the penitentiary model, which by my lights are one and the same.”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously written for a hermetic constituency; the bulk is written for the bourgeoisie, leaving a lean cut for labor. Only the hermetically aimed has a snowball's chance in hell of reaching its intended ears. One proceeds from this realization. A staggering figure of vibrant, intelligent people can and do live without poetry, especially without the poetry of their time. This figure includes the unemployed, the rank and file, the union brass, banker, scientist, lawyer, doctor, architect, pilot, and priest. It also includes most academics, most of the faculty of the humanities, most allegedly literary editors and most allegedly literary critics. They do so--go forward in their lives, toward their great reward, in an engulfing absence of poetry--without being perceived or perceiving themselves as hobbled or deficient in any significant way. It is nearly true, though I am often reminded of a Transtromer broadside I saw in a crummy office building in San Francisco:



We got dressed and showed the house

You live well the visitor said

The slum must be inside you.



If I wanted to understand a culture, my own for instance, and if I thought such an understanding were the basis for a lifelong inquiry, I would turn to poetry first. For it is my confirmed bias that the poets remain the most 'stunned by existence,' the most determined to redeem the world in words..”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“One way to remain
unfinished is to stop.
the other is to go on.”
― Laura Moriarty

“Something unpronounceable
followed by a long silence
points out my life
is becoming a landscape.”
― Mary Ruefle, The Adamant: Poems

“Mother of otherness,
Eat me.
--from "Poem for a Birthday - Who", written 1960”
― Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems

“A black-sharded lady keeps me in a parrot cage.”
― Sylvia Plath

“On detonation, red sugar spilled out of the corner of my mouth.”
― Lara Glenum, The Hounds of No

“Each note is inscribed on a sugar
cube lodged in the hoof of a rabid pig.”
― Lara Glenum, The Hounds of No

“Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.”
― Jasper Fforde, First Among Sequels

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
― Robert Frost

“I will tell you what is poetry...

It is a remote electronic claw picking up a stuffed bunny rabbit...”
― Chelsey Minnis, Bad Bad

“A poem should be odd as a small cast-iron platypus.”
― Dean Young, Skid

“I think with my blood.”
― Cate Marvin, Fragment of the Head of a Queen: Poems

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.”
― Bernard M. Baruch

“If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”
― John Waters

“Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora

“I once typed 'vagina dentata' into dictionary.com and it asked me, 'Did you mean giant anteater?”
― Juliet Cook

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“my pulse points a strained mermaid into the sky
hot gardenias frothing between thighs

dripping like frenzied silkworms, thrusting then erupting

-from the poem 'Stigmata Flicker”
― Juliet Cook, POISONOUS BEAUTYSKULL LOLLIPOP

“Part of the truth is I love the deer from a distance,
the same way a lot of people love me.
I just don't want them close-up staring directly
into my eyes before they knock me down.”
― Juliet Cook

“To be an artist, you need to exist in a world of silence.”
― Louise Bourgeois

“It is not so much where my motivation comes from but rather how it manages to survive.”
― Louise Bourgeois

“The spider is a repairer. If you bash into the web of a spider, she doesn’t get mad. She weaves and repairs it.”
― Louise Bourgeois

“An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.”
― Louise Bourgeois, Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923–1997