Cooling Time Quotes

“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

“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

“Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life.”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“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

“Poetry helps us to suffer more efficiently,”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile.”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“Poetry is tribal not material. As such it lights the fire and keeps watch over the flame. Believe me, this is where you get warm again. And naked. This is where you can remember the good times along with the worst; where you are not allowed to forget the worst, else you cannot be healed.”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“Poetry and advertising (the basest mode of which is propaganda) are in direct and total opposition. If you do not use language you are used by it.”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“As in all callings, poetry secures a kind of ecstasis. There may be a wiser vantage, but we haven’t discovered one yet. Perception leads to further perception. Perceive. Perceive. “See what the grass would see if it had eyes,” writes Oppen.”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“Poets are mostly voters and taxpayers, but the alienation of the poet is a common theme. Among poets there are also probably higher than average rates of clutch burnout, job turnover, rooting about, sleep apnea, noncompliance, nervous leg syndrome, depression, litigation, black clothing, and so forth, but this is where we live, or as Leonard Cohen put it, poetry is the opiate of the poets.”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil

“Writing is a risk and a trust. The best of it lies yonder.”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil