A rejection from The Madison Review came in the mail yesterday. I hope that I receive one final acceptance before the year 2006 is over.

My chapbook is ready to send out to contests.

Yesterday I received a rejection slip from Crazyhorse. I WILL be accepted by that literary magazine some day. Oh, yes!

Poems reveal secrets when they are analyzed. The poet's pleasure in finding ingenious ways to enclose her secrets should be matched by the reader's pleasure in unlocking and revealing these secrets.

--Diane Wakoski


Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.
--Robert Frost


Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

--Salvatore Quasimodo


Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.

--Thomas Gray


Poetry gives the griever not release from grief but companionship in grief. Poetry embodies the complexities of feeling at their most intense and entangled, and therefore offers (over centuries, or over no time at all) the company of tears.

--Donald Hall

True poetry has no interest in improving or idealizing the world, which does well enough. It only wants to realize the world, to see it better.

--John Crowe Ransom


A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.

--Wallace Stevens


Democritus plucked his eye out because he could not look at a woman without thinking of her as a woman. If he had read a few of our novels, he would have torn himself to pieces.

--Wallace Stevens


Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

--Wallace Stevens


If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made out of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.

--Wallace Stevens


Intolerance respecting other people’s religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people’s art.

--Wallace Stevens


Most modern reproducers of life, even including the camera, really repudiate it. We gulp down evil, choke at good.

--Wallace Stevens


The genuine artist is never “true to life.” He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.

--Wallace Stevens


To regard the imagination as metaphysics is to think of it as part of life, and to think to think of it as part of life is to realize the extent of artifice. We live in the mind.

--Wallace Stevens

I received yesterday three rejections: Mid-American Review, The Pinch (formerly River City), and 42opus. Ouch! Getting three rejections at once versus them being spread out makes a big difference as to whether you shrug off rejection or it stings.

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Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.

--Allen Ginsberg


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The Sloth

In moving-slow he has no Peer.
You ask him something in his Ear,
He thinks about it for a Year;

And, then, before he says a Word
There, upside down (unlike a Bird),
He will assume that you have Heard—

A most Ex-as-per-at-ing Lug.
But should you call his manner Smug,
He’ll sigh and give his Branch a Hug;

Then off again to Sleep he goes,
Still swaying gently by his Toes,
And you just know he knows he knows.


--Theodore Roethke

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RCA Victor

The dog sits by the victrola,
his head cocked, listening
to the voice of his master
and thinking:

How different he looks today,
smaller, like a box,
and his head an ornate
megaphone.

Where are the legs
he needs to walk me?
Where are the hands
that throw my ball?

the dog wonders
and begins to shiver.


--Billy Collins