C.D. Wright Quotes
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Readers have to be sought out and won to the light of the page, poem by poem, one by one by one.
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The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile.
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It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.
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Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life.
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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.
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Everyone in their car needs love.
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I am suggesting that the radical of poetry lies not in the resolution of doubts but in their proliferation
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Poetry takes you into the recesses of the language, the neglected corners, cracks and crannies and to the big sky of wonder. It opens the door to a critique without which you have rather boring analytical tools by comparison. To cultivate poetry means to stay with it. Not to abandon hope, but to abide.
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Uniformity, in its motives, its goals, its far-ranging consequences, is the natural enemy of poetry, not to mention the enemy of trees, the soil, the exemplary life therein.
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I have taught the long poem off and on for years. The more book-length poems I read and studied and taught the more interested I was in the possibilities in writing a poetry that applied formal and substantive options of narrative and non-narrative, lyric and non-lyric. I found many pleasures in this kind of writing. The long poem is as old as the art form.
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Poetry is a necessity of life.
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Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.