David Lehman Quotes & Sayings

Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur the artist to new heights if it does not cripple him or her. — David Lehman

The best song lyrics seem to me so artful, so brilliant, so warm and humorous, with both passion and wit, that my admiration is matched only by my envy. — David Lehman

How like a winter has been my hard spring away from you, my harp.
Psalm — David Lehman

Words have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbits and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used. — David Lehman

Obscurantism is the academic theorist's revenge on society for having consigned him or her to relative obscurity - a way of proclaiming one's superiority in the face of one's diminished influence. — David Lehman

Jargon is the verbal sleight of hand that makes the old hat seem newly fashionable; it gives an air of novelty and specious profundity to ideas that, if stated directly, would seem superficial, stale, frivolous, or false. The line between serious and spurious scholarship is an easy one to blur, with jargon on your side. — David Lehman

If you're not paying for it through the health plan, you pay for it in the emergency room. — David Lehman

I am completing a book I began back in 2002 called 'Poems in the Manner of.' 'The Matador of Metaphor' is from this manuscript. It is an homage to Wallace Stevens that appropriates certain of his techniques. — David Lehman

Someday I'd like to go
to Atlantic City with you
not to gamble (just being
there with you is enough
of a gamble) but to ride
the high white breakers
have a Manhattan and listen
to a baritone saxophone
play a tune called "Salsa
Eyes" with you beside me
on a banquette but why
stop there let's go to
Paris in November when
it's raining and we read
the Tribune at La Rotonde
our hotel room has a big
bathtub I knew you'd like
that and we can be a couple
of unknown Americans what
are we waiting for let's go — David Lehman

There is an air of last things, a brooding sense of impending annihilation, about so much deconstructive activity, in so many of its guises; it is not merely postmodernist but preapocalyptic. — David Lehman

If you have too good a time writing hostile reviews, you'll injure not only your sensibility but your soul. — David Lehman