Why Poetry Quotes

“W. S. Merwin said, “Poetry addresses individuals in their most intimate, private, frightened and elated moments. People turn to poetry in times of crisis because it comes closer than any other art form to addressing what cannot be said. In expressing the inexpressible poetry remains close to the origins of language.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“Poets are alchemists of nothingness. They aspire to turn silence, nothingness, absence, into something palpable.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“A poet can take one word - maybe an abstraction, like love or fear or happiness, or an object, something concrete, like a flower or mountain or book - that feels for some reason full of potential energy, unexpressed meaning. The poet then gives herself the space and time and, most important, the freedom from any doctrine to try to allow her mind to leap, for no discernible reason, to another word. then she searches for a way to connect the two. Quite often it doesn't work - there is nothing there. Maybe she tries again, maybe many more times. Sometimes one element will change, or both. Eventually something clicks, an electrical connection is made, a way is found to connect the two things, and the poem begins.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“This poetry - the language stretching out to almost grasp what feels like an unstated truth, in ways one cannot paraphrase without doing reductive violence to the thinking - is also a kind of association, a leap in language across the void between what we think everyday and what we sense, in a deeper way, to be true.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“People do not disbelieve in inequality or racism or global warming because they have not been informed: they disbelieve because they cannot or choose not to imagine. They are cruel because to them, others have become an abstraction, and cannot be truly imagined.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“Poems are imaginative structures built out of words, ones that any reader can enter. They are places of freedom, enlivenment, true communion.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“If a poem is really good, you can’t really say what it’s “about,”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“ONE OF THE GREAT PLEASURES OF READING POETRY IS TO FEEL”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“The true symbolic effect of the text depends on a magical transformation, where the things themselves—sea, old man, boy, fish, sharks—somehow remain themselves and also together create a feeling of greater meaning, one that is never specified.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“Poetry brings into play a countervailing force, one that pushes us toward a state of mind that can feel paradoxically both ambiguous yet full of strong, obscure, yet somehow palpable feelings, ones that do not fall into the usual categories we use to name our emotions and experiences.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“Metaphor is not the original thing being compared, or what it is being compared to, but the interaction between the two of them. It is not merely a comparison of one thing to another, but the creation of a new, third resonance, a field of meaning.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“The fundamental mechanisms that make a metaphor—unexpected association, and an activation of the latent potential energy of words, along with a reminder of their dangerous and exciting provisionality—are central to poetic activity.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“the truths of poetry are intimately related to associative movement.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“Your only job is to follow your instinctive, personal, idiosyncratic sense of what is beautiful, and to see what emerges.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“Maybe poems are not to be read for their great answers, but for their great, more often than not unanswerable, questions.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“Poetry is the place where the ultimately irresolvable negotiation between public and private in language, and in life, is brought forward,”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“the real, freely reimagined and recombined, is precisely what comprises the stuff of poetry.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“Poems make possible a conscious entry into the preconscious mind, a lucid dreaming.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“Poetry is a constructed conversation on the frontier of dreaming.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“Poems are common to human experience because they trace the movement of thought,”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“poetry has always been a record of the movement of the mind.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“that choice to be ready to reject all other purposes, in favor of the possibilities of language freed from utility, is when the writer becomes a poet.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“Poems are the place where the actuality of language and of life is most made available. And it is up to us not to evade it.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“The symbol in a poem does not function the way it does in everyday life. It operates the way a metaphor does, by introducing the possibility of comparison. But unlike a metaphor, the comparison is never completed. There is only the original thing, and the very strong feeling that it is going to transform, as in a metaphor, but without the other, completing term. Ed Hirsch writes in his Poetic Glossary that "in poetry, a symbol offers a surplus of resonance." This surplus is that strong feeling of meaning, implied but ultimately left unspecified and undefined.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“The way the mind is moving-associatively-is what the poem is "about". It could be said its "how" (form) is its "what" (content). By moving associatively, from subject to subject, the poem is asserting something about the fundamental nature of the world, and about the relations among things, relations we might not consciously perceive in our everyday lives. To create a place where our minds can experience this movement is, as much as any ideas that are expressed, the purpose of the poem.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“When looking at poetry more generally, we can see that his "arc of association which corresponds to the inner life of the objects" is a subset of a general principle of associative moment. Leaping or association in a poem is just as likely to be formal: rhyme, metaphor, quick unexpected movements in a narrative, the juxtaposition of images, and contradiction are all forms of association.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

“To resist the pressure of the real is to preserve a space within ourselves, where everything we see and know can get recombined, in the hopes of a deeper and more mysterious knowledge. we do this resisting, this pushing back, not with the euphemism or the rhetoric of politics, nor with the received dead language of any ideology, but with words alive with possibility, charged with meaning.”
― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry