Given my penchant for quoting poets—an unfortunate, but mostly harmless, effect of passion, insecurity or both—I was pleased to hear about Quote Poet Unquote: Contemporary Quotations on Poets and Poetry by Dennis O’Driscoll, a working civil servant since the age of 16 whose poetry belt* is, evidently, magical. I see no other option. The structural integrity of an average poetry belt would be debilitated by the unreasonable number of notches his seems to have. Or maybe my poetry belt is just the cheap kind? 

Some excerpts: 

“I started a PhD in English at the University of Chicago because I loved poetry-which I now realize is like saying I studied vivisection because I loved dogs.”

—Michael Donaghy, Verse 

 

“My self-esteem is so low that getting the Pulitzer Prize just made me break even.”

—Franz Wright 

 

“We are all interested in our own poems, just as we are interested in the smell of our own armpits, because they are uniquely redolent of ourselves.”

—Editorial in The Spectator

There are moments of poetic pageantry, I’m sure, but from the handful of one-liners I’ve seen, it seems like it could be worthwhile to wade through the apotheoses?

Then again, those might not be too much trouble for me. I’m a pushover for silver-tongued truthiness, especially idiosyncratic dicta–and I’ve had just enough learning to misquote, which sometimes passes, if I’m lucky, for wit. Yes?

*Arbitrary note: There are, apparently, poetry belts.