37 Quotes by Li-Young Lee

People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush.

Every time you write a poem it’s apocalyptic. You’re revealing who you really are to yourself.

The problem with memory is that is changes whatever it touches. It is never that accurate. As a result, I end up modifying and revising my own experiences. It’s myth making.

While all bodies share the same fate, all voices do not.

A bruise, blue in the muscle, you impinge upon me. As bone hugs the ache home, so I’m vexed to love you, your body the shape of returns, your hair a torso of light, your heat I must have, your opening I’d eat, each moment of that soft-finned fruit, inverted fountain in which I don’t see me.

Maybe being winged means being wounded by infinity.

That’s what I want, that kind of recklessness where the poem is even ahead of you. It’s like riding a horse that’s a little too wild for you, so there’s this tension between what you can do and what the horse decides it’s going to do.

A poem is like a score for the human voice.

The knowledge that it takes to write a poem gets burnt up in the writing of the poem.