Breaking the Alabaster Jar Quotes

“That's what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It's like riding a horse that's a little too wild for you, so there's this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it's going to do.”
― Li-Young Lee, Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee

“I don't mind suffering as long as it's really about something. I don't mind great luck, if it's about something. If it's the hollow stuff, then there's no gift, one way or the other.”
― Li-Young Lee, Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee

“Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming.”
― Li-Young Lee, Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee

“..in the last few years American poetry has come out of a poetry of complaint, not praising, and it was initially maybe rich. And it can continue to be rich if we remember that we shouldn't write out of complaint. We should write out of grief, but not grievance. Grief is rich, ecstatic. But grievance is not -- it's a complaint, it's whining.”
― Li-Young Lee, Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee

“I think it has to do with a backward notion of what the past and the present are. The Eastern notion is that the past lies ahead of us, and the future is behind us. We are moving into the future. If we can see it, it is already gone....We are constantly inhabiting the immediate past. How do we get to a place where that's not going on? And I might add this: the fractured quality of a lot of twentieth-century writing comes about because frequently we've taken our eyes off our homeland, our true place, and we've looked at the past. The past looks fractured and confused; we forget when we're doing mimetic art; we think, Well, our art has to look like this reality, which is broken and confused and discontinuous. We've forgotten that this is not where we're supposed to be looking. We're not supposed to be looking forward, upward, if you will, not back.”
― Li-Young Lee, Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee