22 Quotes by Frank Bidart

Old, he includedhimself in his scorn for those whoyoung want the opposite of this earththen settlefor more of it.

Though the body is itsgenesis, a poem is the vision of a processOut of ceaseless motion in edgeless spaceCarved in space, vision your poor eye's singlearmor against winter spring summer fall

Understand that when the beast within yousucceeds again in paralyzing into unendingincompletion whatever you again had the temerity totry to makeits triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of itsrectitude. It knows that it aloneknows you.

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 memorial that is ward and warning. Without these ancient springs poems are merely more words.

The law is that youmust livein the house you have built.The law is absurd: it iswritten down nowhere.You are uncertain what crimeis, though each life writhing toelude what it has madefeels like punishment.

SongYou know that it is there, lairwhere the bear ceasesfor a time even to exist.Crawl in. You have at last killedenough and eaten enough to be fatenough to cease for a time to exist.Crawl in. It takes talent to live at night, and scorningothers you had that talent, but now you sniffthe season when you must cease to exist.Crawl in. Whatever for good or illgrows within you needsyou for a time to cease to exist.It is not raining insidetonight. You know that it is there. Crawl in.

Insanity is the insistence on meaning.

We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.

But being is making; not only large things, a family, a book, a business; but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between friends, a meal.