Don Paterson Quotes & Sayings

A poetic form is essentially a codified pattern of silence. We have a little silence at the end of a line, a bigger one at the end of a stanza, and a huge one at the end of the poem. The semantic weight of the poem tends to naturally distribute itself according to that pattern of silence, paying especial care to the sounds and meanings of the words and phrases that resonate into the little empty acoustic of the line-ending, or the connecting hallway of stanza-break, or the big church of the poem's end. — Don Paterson

The poem, in a sense, is no more or less than a little machine for remembering itself ... Poetry is therefore primarily a commemorative act. — Don Paterson

Critics all have this idea that authors inhabit another dimensional realm, right up to their first smack in the mouth - which feels to them quite miraculous, being their sex-dream come true. — Don Paterson

Imagine your shadow burning off the page / As the dear world and the dead word disengage — Don Paterson

We could easily have evolved eyelids thick enough to keep out the light, but we still need to see the shadows fall across them. We're not yet safe. — Don Paterson

Lakoff's idea is that most of our thought is guided by underlying conceptual mappings between two domains that share some content, that overlap in the sets of their attributes ... Contrary to the assertions of Lakoff and some of the cognitive metaphor theorists, people can read through to an underlying mapping, but only when the surface metaphor is new to them. — Don Paterson

Fate's book, but my italics. — Don Paterson

No fury more righteous than that of a sinner accused of the wrong sin. — Don Paterson

Falling and flying are near identical sensations, in all but one final detail. — Don Paterson

The aphorism is already a shadow of itself. — Don Paterson

Poetry, unlike music, is a meta-art, and relies upon non-physical structures for the production of its effects. In its case, the medium is syntax, grammar and logical continuity, which together form the carrier-wave of plain sense within which its deeper meanings are broadcast. — Don Paterson

I can see exactly what not to do at the moment. No doubt through the usual process of elimination I'll arrive at my favourite strategy of total paralysis. — Don Paterson

This capacity for oversignifying, for reading in, is precisely what poets tap into, both in their own practice and in the poem the give to the reader; and in doing so they turn language against its own project of conceptual division, and use it to heal itself - and in the process - paradoxically - to articulate new concepts that it can't yet accommodate. — Don Paterson

Anything that elicits an immediate nod of recognition has only reconfirmed a prejudice. — Don Paterson

So we start with an oversignifying reader. Those texts that appear to reward this reader for this additional investment - text that we find exceptionally suggestive, apposite, or musical - are usually adjudged to be 'poetic' ... The work of the poet is to contribute a text that will firstly invite such a reading; and secondly reward such a reading. — Don Paterson

Inconveniently, books are all the pages in them, not just the ones you choose to read. — Don Paterson

We turn from the light to see. — Don Paterson

Lurking behind this connecting silence is a brooding suspicion over the extent to which the perceptual user-preferences of the human animal limit and distort its experience of reality, and the consequently unreliable nature of much of its thought. Poetry is the means by which we correct the main tool of that thought, language, for its anthropic distortions: it is language's self-corrective function, and everywhere challenges our Adamite inheritance - the catastrophic, fragmenting design of our conceptualizing machinery - through the insistence on a counterbalancing project, that of lyric unity. — Don Paterson

After a long period of reflection, he decided that he was in fact right yet again. — Don Paterson

Mediocre art is far worse than bad art. Bad art does not waste our time. — Don Paterson