Frank Bidart

Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves.

— Frank Bidart

“What takes place in me stays there.”

— Frank Bidart

Once you reach what is / inside it is outside.

— Frank Bidart

We live in a hell of opinions.

— Frank Bidart

Play, and escaping the ideology one grew up in, is freedom.

— Frank Bidart

Insanity is the insistence on meaning.

— Frank Bidart

Earth you know is round but seems flat. // You can't trust / your senses.

— Frank Bidart

“We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them change them and are changed.”

— Frank Bidart

To make a film you have to dream a film... that's true of poetry as well.

— Frank Bidart

“Wanting to be a movie star…answering an ad at ten or eleven. You made your mother drive you to Hollywood.”

— Frank Bidart

“(Poem on anorexic): The only way to escape the history of styles is not to have a body.”

— Frank Bidart

“The stratagems by which briefly you ameliorated, even seemingly untwisted what still twists within you — you loved their taste and lay…

— Frank Bidart

“drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnal round, the monotonous sorrow of the finite, within       I am awake…

— Frank Bidart

But being is making; not only large things, a family, a book, a business; but the shape we give this afternoon, a…

— Frank Bidart

“The law is that you must live in the house you have built. The law is absurd: it is written down nowhere.…

— Frank Bidart

“up or down from the infinite C E N T E R B R I M M I N G at the…

— Frank Bidart

“Horrible the fate of the advice-giver in our culture: to repeat oneself in a thousand contexts until death, or irrelevance. * I…

— Frank Bidart

“Though the body is its genesis, a poem is the vision of a process Out of ceaseless motion in edgeless space Carved…

— Frank Bidart

“then the voice in my head said WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS REVOLT AGAINST IT WHAT…

— Frank Bidart

“Sweet fiction, in which bravado and despair beckon from a cold panache, in which the protected essential self suffers flashes of its…

— Frank Bidart

“The gestures poems make are the same as the gestures of ritual injunction — curse; exorcism; prayer; underlying everything perhaps, the attempt…

— Frank Bidart

“Understand that when the beast within you succeeds again in paralyzing into unending incompletion whatever you again had the temerity to try…

— Frank Bidart

“I'm not a fool, I knew from the beginning what couldn't happen. What couldn't happen didn't. The enterprise is abandoned. But half…

— Frank Bidart

“Song You know that it is there, lair where the bear ceases for a time even to exist. Crawl in. You have…

— Frank Bidart

“The Old Man at the Wheel Measured against the immeasurable universe, no word you have spoken brought light. Brought light to what,…

— Frank Bidart

“—No one knows why. Perhaps her mind, ravenous, still insatiable, sensed that to struggle with the shreds of a voice must make…

— Frank Bidart