“—No one knows why. Perhaps her mind, ravenous, still insatiable, sensed that to struggle with the shreds of a voice must make her artistry subtler, more refined, more capable of expressing humiliation, rage, betrayal ... —Perhaps the opposite. Perhaps her… — Frank Bidart Copy Share Image
“We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them change them and are changed.” — Frank Bidart Copy Share Image
“up or down from the infinite C E N T E R B R I M M I N G at the winking rim of time the voice in my head said LOVE IS THE DISTANCE BETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVE” — 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 is dreams, delirium, everything that underlies that feeds that keeps alive the illusion of sanity, semi- sanity, we allow others to see. The half of me that feeds the rest is in mourning. Mourns. Each time… — 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 Image
“The gestures poems make are the same as the gestures of ritual injunction — curse; exorcism; prayer; underlying everything perhaps, the attempt to make someone or something live again. Both poet and shaman make a model that stands for the whole. Substitution, symbolic substitution. The mind conceives that something lived, or might live. Implicit is the demand to understand. The… — 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 Image
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 Image
Earth you know is round but seems flat. // You can't trust / your senses. — Frank Bidart Copy Share Image
“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 Image