Ally

“All of this makes dying sound meaningful and sweet. And it is true that, if you are lucky, there is a seam of sweetness and meaning to be found within it, a vein of silver in a dark cave a thousand feet underground. Still, the cave is a cave.”
― Kathryn Schulz, Lost & Found: A Memoir

“Some poets have argued that the rejection of line carries a kind of political charge, just as poets once felt that the rejection of rhyming verse for blank verse or blank verse for free verse carried a political charge. This may be true in a particular time at a particular place. But it cannot be true categorically. For example, even if the heroic couplet was once associated with hierarchical thinking in the eighteenth century, it does not follow that the heroic couplet will always inevitably be doomed to reproduce the same hierarchies in our thought. The relationship between formal choice and ideological position is constantly shifting, and it isn’t possible to predict the repercussions of formal decisions except inasmuch as we might see them played out in the work of individual poets.”
― James Longenbach, The Art of the Poetic Line

“It is really is just true that I don't think of a reader when I'm writing. Maybe that's because for twenty years I was a poet and knew no one would read me.”
― Garth Greenwell

“Standardization is a double-edged sword. It will slice you open as easily as it optimizes efficiency.

Any tag-and-track system we make standard will be co-opted to capture or kill free drones. Let's keep our mismash patchwork, keep ourselves inscrutable and inefficient. Visibility is a trap.”
― Ann Leblanc