I am a relatively rational being and I like to create order in poems. I like meter, I like rhyme, but ultimately I don't know where the poems come from, and I feel, at least in the beginning, that I'm… — Mary Jo Salter Copy Share Image
Like a page dipped in ink, your cuff's in my coffee. / You have something to tell with unbuttoned sleeves. — Mary Jo Salter Copy Share Image
Part of what the imagination does later in life is it's linking you not just to who you are now but to all the… — Mary Jo Salter Copy Share Image
Writing is a bit like walking into a big bookstore. It's the bookstore of your brain, and you know you're never going to read all those books. It makes you happy you're in the bookstore, and you're nervous because you know you're never going to read all those books. So the nervousness is also happy. Once I get going writing… — Mary Jo Salter Copy Share
The one concession I've made as I've gotten older is that my children are now adults and they're in their twenties and thirties and so I'm careful about how I write about them. I may write about them as a child, but I'm not going to write about their current struggles because they're adults and they can do it for… — Mary Jo Salter Copy Share
And I said to myself, here's the problem with the world: The Italians are too Italian, and nobody else is Italian enough. — Mary Jo Salter Copy Share Image
A number of people have written poems about Trump already, and I salute them. He is so beyond anything we could have imagined and… — Mary Jo Salter Copy Share Image
As poets, we're writing into the void, and we're not writing to be bestsellers. Whatever individual responses we get, whether at a reading, by… — Mary Jo Salter Copy Share Image
Money is that dear thing which, if you're not careful, you can squander your whole life thinking of. — Mary Jo Salter Copy Share Image
Political poetry is the hardest thing to write because you cannot preach to the converted, and if you're only seeking to convert, then write… — Mary Jo Salter Copy Share Image
All writers know in advance that they are not going be able to reproduce in its wonderful fullness the thing that's in their heads;… — Mary Jo Salter Copy Share Image
I am a relatively rational being and I like to create order in poems. I like meter, I like rhyme, but ultimately I don't… — Mary Jo Salter Copy Share Image
