Albert Goldbarth Quotes & Sayings

If you agree with me that a poem can be as bountiful as a rich Victorian narrative, and as wise ... then you'll want to join me here in the Wow, I Like No Need of Sympathy Club. Your membership fee is the same as your membership privileges: this book. — Albert Goldbarth

Perhaps you have seen me. I know well, my purpose was merely that of a symbol, 'equals', 'times' ... ; but what is said, for all that, was identity-less: a kind of live geometry. — Albert Goldbarth

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course you're tired. Every atom in you has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes nonstop from mitosis to now. Quit tapping your feet. They'll dance inside themselves without you. — Albert Goldbarth

Talk to me. I'll believe anything. — Albert Goldbarth

I don't spend time thinking about an aesthetic out of which I create or an ideal toward which my body of work is heading. It's amazing, when I read interviews with other poets, to see how articulately they discuss their own writing, as if they were sharing long-held theories on the work of Pope or Keats. I'm happy enough that I've poured the best of myself into the poems themselves. — Albert Goldbarth

I hope any poem I've ever written could stand on its own and not need to be a part of biography, critical theory or cultural studies. I don't want to give a poetry reading and have to provide the story behind the poem in order for it to make sense to an audience. I certainly don't want the poem to require a critical intermediary - a "spokescritic." I want my poems to be independently meaningful moments of power for a good reader. And that's the expectation I initially bring to other poets' writing. — Albert Goldbarth