top of page
.png){kind=small}
"The title of the poems was The Only Bar in Dixon. We sent it out to The New Yorker on a fluke, and they took them and printed all three in the same issue."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Poems quotes
"I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me."
"By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow."
"There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know."
"I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places."
"Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems."
"I used to carry about with me a German map-case filled with poems."
Explore more quotes by James Welch
"Nobody would take checks from Indians, nobody would give them any credit, and nobody would let them drink in the bars. There was a rudeness, a brusqueness, with which the Indians were treated constantly. At a very young age, that had entered my consciousness."
"The economic piece is still missing, since it's so hard to attract industry to reservations, but spiritually and educationally, they're doing just fine. Each tribe has a community college now, and they teach the language, they teach the traditions."
"I think ethnic and regional labels are insulting to writers and really put restrictions on them. People don't think your work is quite as universal."
"The townspeople outside the reservations had a very superior attitude toward Indians, which was kind of funny, because they weren't very wealthy; they were on the fringes of society themselves."
"I wander around, get the lay of the land and try to imagine what kind of people would have lived there in that historical period. What would they eat? What kind of clothing would they wear? How did they shelter themselves? How did they get around?"
"Before, Indian people had been so defeated, they were always looking for outsiders, for the government, to somehow come in and fix things. But now, they seem to realize that they're the only ones who can save themselves."
"I used to object to being called an Indian writer, and would always say I was a writer who happened to be an Indian, and who happened to write about Indians."
"My poems were just kind of all over the place. They had no focus, no location, nothing. Kind of a series of images that could have been set anywhere. A lot of the poems were just exercises for myself."
bottom of page