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. 

I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve been reading Conversations with Richard Wilbur. Maybe I’m a little ashamed. Regardless, I will now regale you with Richard Wilbur quotes. Please don’t despise me too terribly much.

 ”The drug experience is shadow-boxing, and the business of the poet is to be confronting, with his imagination, these solid objects here.”

“[I]n the poetry of this school [the New York School] generally you find a hidden sentimentalism–they all think childhood was the best of times; there’s no sadder sound in nature than the sound of a running-down nursery music box.”

“I don’t care much for confessional poetry when it is just the sort of whining you get at a bar from drunks.”

And, of course, an obligatory quote on form, the length of which probably reveals something about my character:

“If I say hook-book to you, it’s not the same as if I said brush-stadium. There’s some kind of implicit, magical demand made on you by the fact that hook and book sound a bit alike, and your mind starts trying to pull them together in some way or the other…. There are certain kinds of control that you can’t have [in free verse]…. There’s an example–I hope I can quote it properly–a poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins’, one of his terrible sonnets. It begins, ‘No worse, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief;/ More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring./ Comforter, where, where is your comforting./ Mary, mother of us, where is thy relief?’ Notice the relationship between that ‘wilder wring’ in the second line and that ‘comforting’ in the third. The ‘wring’ is a very hard rhyme, and ‘comforting’ breaks off, and it tells you where to break your voice. It almost lets your voice crack at the end of the third line. There’s the kind of accurate music that a fine user of rhyme can force.”

Granted, I had to go through a lot of interviews to find those three gems of snark, but — oh! — wasn’t it all worth it?