26 Quotes by Carolyn Kizer

Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking, in need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware, keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.

What is so marvelous about living today is that it is possible to extend, like a flower, spreading petals in all directions.

In some ways painters have been more important in my life than writers. Painters teach you how to see—a faculty that usually isn’t highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing.

A poet, to whom no one cruel and imposing listens, / Disdained by senates, whispers to your dust,

He said, "You have pigs in this poem; pigs are not poetic." I got up and walked out of that class and never went back.

Poems, to me, do not come from ideas, they come from a series of images that you tuck away in the back of your brain. Little photographic snapshots. Then you get the major vision of the poem, which is like a giant magnet to which all these disparate little impressions fly and adhere, and there is the poem!

You cannot meet someone for a moment, or even cast eyes on someone in the street, without changing. That is my subject.

He said, “You have pigs in this poem; pigs are not poetic.” I got up and walked out of that class and never went back.