Alex Lemon Quotes & Sayings

My poems and prose are not often in direct conversation with each other, but there's so much crossover - everything that comes out of that crucible of language - that working in poetry and prose is energizing - to me as a writer and to the work itself. — Alex Lemon

Being deeply aware of fragility and ecstasy seems to me an essential part of being alive and living fully - and there's no way for me to separate this from my poems. — Alex Lemon

Poetry needs to be alive, unabashedly, and, for me, that entails seeing its complexity, the grit and grimness and jubilance and beauty. — Alex Lemon

I think of my best poems as vessels that I can or hope to fill with everything I have. — Alex Lemon

The world comes to us in fragments and shards. Whatever stories we shape from our days, we're always dealing with gaps, blank-spots, and blackouts - and in handling all these breakages, we are, at all times, so incredibly intimate with sharp edges, the unending knife-like moments of failure and joy in our lives. — Alex Lemon

I see the relationship sincerity/humor differently. Instead of seeing a balance between them, I see them more inextricably linked, as if one is the hard candy shell that gives to the other, or one is the apparition, the ghost-image that invokes the other. — Alex Lemon

Poetry does need a bit of ferocity. The only way to attend to the fractured world is to write a ferocious kind of music, to sing that volatility. — Alex Lemon