“Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously written for a hermetic constituency;… — C.D. Wright Copy Share Image
There is an idealism associated with poetry I would not dispel but question. It doesn't change anything except within. It shifts your insides around.… — C.D. Wright Copy Share Image
Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified. — C.D. Wright Copy Share Image
It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so. — C.D. Wright Copy Share Image
Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets,… — C.D. Wright Copy Share Image
One opinion I share with the Dadaists is that art-making presupposes a revolutionary state of mind. Assimilating the practice into commodity or symbol of… — C.D. Wright Copy Share Image
Poetry requires deliberate movement in its direction, a filament of faith in its persistence, receptivity to its fundamental worthwhileness. Within its unanesthetized heart there… — C.D. Wright Copy Share Image
“If the incision of our words amounts to nothing but a feeling, a slow motion, it will still cut a better swath than the… — C.D. Wright Copy Share Image
Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life. — C.D. Wright Copy Share Image
The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile. — C.D. Wright Copy Share Image
I have taught the long poem off and on for years. The more book-length poems I read and studied and taught the more interested… — C.D. Wright Copy Share Image
