Albert Goldbarth Quotes
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Physics says: go to sleep. Of course you're tired. Every atom in you has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes nonstop from mitosis to now. Quit tapping your feet. They'll dance inside themselves without you.
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If you agree with me that a poem can be as bountiful as a rich Victorian narrative, and as wise... then you'll want to join me here in the Wow, I Like No Need of Sympathy Club. Your membership fee is the same as your membership privileges: this book.
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I don't spend time thinking about an aesthetic out of which I create or an ideal toward which my body of work is heading. It's amazing, when I read interviews with other poets, to see how articulately they discuss their own writing, as if they were sharing long-held theories on the work of Pope or Keats. I'm happy enough that I've poured the best of myself into the poems themselves.
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Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow, Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle, Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town and History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.
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If your life depended on coming up with a tally, if you could straighten its numbers into a flexible line around the moon and back a dozen times, a hundred … still you couldn’t count the planets that cohabit this planet.
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How many hands were shook and names were signed and pipes were passed congenially in a circle, before the first of the used-car dealerships rose up on the ground where the gods had walked?
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I think it's the future. At least, it's the future we called "tomorrow." Here it is, "today": one hundred cups of effort, good intentions, small misunderstandings, stretching away from the bed and finally leading back to it.
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... I slipped our wicker bed and walked the sands where we were also roughly repeated: some young couple, "you did," "I didn't," "you sure the fuck did" – they hugged that bicker to their chests like blankets fighting cold.
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"love," or "falling in love," an extra density textured into the weave of the days, a craziness, an orchidaceous interdimensional blossoming of the otherwise linear creatures we were.
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Perhaps you have seen me. I know well, my purpose was merely that of a symbol, 'equals', 'times'... ; but what is said, for all that, was identity-less: a kind of live geometry.
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Talk to me. I'll believe anything.
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I hope any poem I've ever written could stand on its own and not need to be a part of biography, critical theory or cultural studies. I don't want to give a poetry reading and have to provide the story behind the poem in order for it to make sense to an audience. I certainly don't want the poem to require a critical intermediary - a "spokescritic." I want my poems to be independently meaningful moments of power for a good reader. And that's the expectation I initially bring to other poets' writing.