13 Quotes by C.D. Wright

Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.

I am suggesting that the radical of poetry lies not in theresolution of doubts but in their proliferation

Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life.

Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances.

If the incision of our words amounts to nothing but a feeling, a slow motion, it will still cut a better swath than the factory model, the corporate model, the penitentiary model, which by my lights are one and the same.

Poetry is tribal not material. As such it lights the fire and keeps watch over the flame. Believe me, this is where you get warm again. And naked. This is where you can remember the good times along with the worst; where you are not allowed to forget the worst, else you cannot be healed.

Readers have to be sought out and won to the light of the page, poem by poem, one by one by one.

Everyone in their car needs love.

The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile.