“The law is that you must live in the house you have built. The law is absurd: it is written down nowhere. You are uncertain what crime is, though each life writhing to elude what it has made feels like… — 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… — Frank Bidart Copy Share Image
“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 Image
“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… — Frank Bidart Copy Share Image
“—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
“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 Image
“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 Image
“(Poem on anorexic): The only way to escape the history of styles is not to have a body.” — Frank Bidart Copy Share Image
