“Understand that when the beast within you succeeds again in paralyzing into unending incompletion whatever you again had the temerity to try to make its triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of its rectitude. It knows that it alone knows… — Frank Bidart Copy Share Image
“We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them change them and are changed.” — Frank Bidart Copy Share
“up or down from the infinite C E N T E R B R I M M I N G at the winking rim… — Frank Bidart Copy Share
“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 our life… — Frank Bidart Copy Share
“drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnal round, the monotonous sorrow of the finite, within I am awake repairing in… — Frank Bidart Copy Share
“The gestures poems make are the same as the gestures of ritual injunction — curse; exorcism; prayer; underlying everything perhaps, the attempt to make… — Frank Bidart Copy Share
“—No one knows why. Perhaps her mind, ravenous, still insatiable, sensed that to struggle with the shreds of a voice must make her artistry… — Frank Bidart Copy Share
But being is making; not only large things, a family, a book, a business; but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between… — Frank Bidart Copy Share
“Sweet fiction, in which bravado and despair beckon from a cold panache, in which the protected essential self suffers flashes of its existence to… — Frank Bidart Copy Share
“Horrible the fate of the advice-giver in our culture: to repeat oneself in a thousand contexts until death, or irrelevance. * I abjure advice-giver.” — Frank Bidart Copy Share
“The stratagems by which briefly you ameliorated, even seemingly untwisted what still twists within you — you loved their taste and lay there on… — Frank Bidart Copy Share
“(Poem on anorexic): The only way to escape the history of styles is not to have a body.” — Frank Bidart Copy Share
