If you want to be a writer in the world you really have to sit down and say, 'Why do I want to do this and why was I drawn to it to begin with?' And keep reminding yourself to… — Dorianne Laux Copy Share Image
The changes that have occurred in poetry have been minor when you look at it over the scale of human time. It's like a rose, maybe a hybrid with color and size differentials, but the same genus, plucked from the… — Dorianne Laux Copy Share Image
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… — Dorianne Laux Copy Share Image
“How many losses does it take to stop a heart, to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire?” — Dorianne Laux Copy Share Image
And I saw it didn't matter who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone. The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty of the Iranian attendant, the thickening clouds--nothing was mine. And I understood finally, after a semester of philosophy, a thousand books of poetry, after death and childbirth and the startled cries of men who called out… — Dorianne Laux Copy Share
The reason I started writing was because I was a little kid in San Diego who was getting beaten up by her dad and… — Dorianne Laux Copy Share Image
I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I'm writing about those actual, factual experiences or not. — Dorianne Laux Copy Share Image
Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's. — Dorianne Laux Copy Share Image
Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t. — Dorianne Laux Copy Share Image
We're all writing out of a wound, and that's where our song comes from. The wound is singing. We're singing back to those who've… — Dorianne Laux Copy Share Image
You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any… — Dorianne Laux Copy Share Image
Someone spoke to me last night, told me the truth. Just a few words, but I recognized it. I knew I should make myself… — Dorianne Laux Copy Share Image
It's difficult to talk about [W.S.] Merwin's poems, as it's hard to talk about a feeling or a smell. It is what it is, but so much so that it overwhelms both sense and the senses. I aspire to something about his work, that imbues his poems, though I'm not sure I could say what that is. A purity, maybe,… — Dorianne Laux Copy Share
We continue to speak, if only in whispers, to something inside us that longs to be named. — Dorianne Laux Copy Share Image
