Dorianne Laux Quotes

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's.

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Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.

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We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it.

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Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won't magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them - consciously and unconsciously - your style will develop.

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Poetry is an intimate act. It's about bringing forth something that's inside you-whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiritual. It's about making something, in language, which can be transmitted to others-not as information, or polemic, but as irreducible art.

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Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question.

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Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.

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Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us.

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