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"Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other."
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"Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other."
Poetry

"When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence."
Poetry

"The woman poet must be either a sexless, reclusive eccentric, with nothing to say specifically to women, or a brilliant, tragic, tortured suicide."
Woman

"I wonder what it means about American literary culture and its transmission when I consider the number of American poets who earn their living teaching creative writing in universities. I've ended up doing that myself."
Literature

"I worked at all kinds of jobs, mostly commercial editing."
Employment

"I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years."
Reading

"Given the devaluation of literature and of the study of foreign languages per se in the United States, as well as the preponderance of theory over text in graduate literature studies, creative writing programs keep literature courses populated."
Literature

"The pull between sound and syntax creates a kind of musical tension in the language that interests me."
Language

"We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies."
Writing

"Paris is a wonderful city. I can't say I belong to an especially anglophone community."
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"You need a poetic touch from the outer space? Then you need the moonlight!"
Author Name
Personal Development

"I love writing poetry because it's pretty. I love writing pretty."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Good poetry does not exist merely for the sake of itself, but rather, is a byproduct of yearning and growth; great poetry canonizes that yearning for the growth of others."
Author Name
Personal Development

"I can write no stately proemAs a prelude to my lay;From a poet to a poemI would dare to say.For if of these fallen petalsOne to you seem fair,Love will waft it till it settlesOn your hair.And when wind and winter hardenAll the loveless land,It will whisper of the garden,You will understand."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Deep down there is a rose in every heart."
Author Name
Personal Development

"At seventeen I tried to write poetry confining myself solely to Anglo-Saxon words - don't know if it helped, but it made me more concrete ..."
Author Name
Personal Development

"You know the way of the wind in the night-the desolate alleys my soul takes."
Author Name
Personal Development

"The mint from your breath, the milk from your breast, the best of your mind, now in its worst state of condition. From the womb to the tomb, as a mild flower, you break your petals upon blossom, and seize death openly. Leaving your fragrance to spin and dance, one last time before being blown away."
Author Name
Personal Development

"On my strand, lovely flowers their blossoms unfold,My mother shall grace thee with garments of gold."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet."
Author Name
Personal Development
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