Dorianne Laux Quotes & Sayings

Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks. — Dorianne Laux

Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won't magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them
consciously and unconsciously
your style will develop. — Dorianne Laux

... They are savage
for knowledge, for beauty and truth.
They crawl on their knees to find it. — Dorianne Laux

If you want to be a writer in the world you really have to sit down and say, Why do I want to do this and why was I drawn to it to begin with? And keep reminding yourself to return to that original impulse. — Dorianne Laux

A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world. — Dorianne Laux

And oh, the oh my nape of the neck. The up-swept oh my nape of the neck. I could walk behind anyone and fall in love. Don't stop. Don't turn around. — Dorianne Laux

We with my husband [Joseph Millar] are often the first reader for one another's work, and we often also have the last word. We trust each other. We have our past working life in common, our recombined families, as well as our life as teachers, and we read much of the same literature and have similar esthetics, so there's a simpatico there. But we do disagree and that can be fruitful, even if it's not so great in the moment. — Dorianne Laux

To write without any awareness of a tradition you are trying to become a part of would be self-defeating. Every artist alive responds to the history of his or her art - borrowing, stealing, rebelling against, and building on what other artists have done. — Dorianne Laux

We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all; and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it. — Dorianne Laux

Poetry is an intimate act. It's about bringing forth something that's inside you
whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiritual. It's about making something, in language, which can be transmitted to others
not as information, or polemic, but as irreducible art. — Dorianne Laux

I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I'm writing about those actual, factual experiences or not. — Dorianne Laux

When you have worked with people all day who have so little and struggle to make it stretch, who live outside the rarefied, you are humbled. — Dorianne Laux

I share my life experiences as a poet with my students. My poetic difficulties, joys, struggles and discoveries. If I read a new poem or essay or book I'm excited about, I bring it in. — Dorianne Laux

Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's. — Dorianne Laux

Moon In the Window
I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets. — Dorianne Laux

There is so much about the process of writing that is mysterious to me, but this one thing I've found to be true: writing begets writing. — Dorianne Laux

We all get habituated, right? You get up in the morning, have your coffee, and read your newspaper, and that's great. Everybody loves life in its mundane, daily aspects. It's what makes us feel secure. But I also start to go numb a little bit and I don't see what's around me. So I put myself in a new situation and suddenly I'm really seeing the person next to me, hearing music, and I'm smelling, and I can't help but want to write it down. — Dorianne Laux

It's difficult to talk about [W.S.] Merwin's poems, as it's hard to talk about a feeling or a smell. It is what it is, but so much so that it overwhelms both sense and the senses. I aspire to something about his work, that imbues his poems, though I'm not sure I could say what that is. A purity, maybe, the kind of purity that comes from being beaten, like steel. — Dorianne Laux

I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live. I know the life I could have lived without it. Both on the physical plain, and the soul plain. Poetry helps us endure. — Dorianne Laux

The slate black sky. The middle step
of the back porch. And long ago

my mother's necklace, the beads
rolling north and south. Broken

the rose stem, water into drops, glass
knob on the bedroom door. Last summer's

pot of parsley and mint, white roots
shooting like streamers through the cracks.

Years ago the cat's tail, the bird bath,
the car hood's rusted latch. Broken

little finger on my right hand at birth--
I was pulled out too fast. What hasn't

been rent, divided, split? Broken the days into nights, the night sky

into stars, the stars into patterns
I make up as I trace them

with a broken-off blade
of grass. Possible, unthinkable,

the cricket's tiny back as I lie
on the lawn in the dark, my hart

a blue cup fallen from someone's hands. — Dorianne Laux

I think what life experience has brought to my poems is compassion. When you work hard to make a living, raise a child up into the world, fail at marriage and try again, teach and fail, travel and fall, become ill, well again, weak but grateful, you learn patience, forbearance. — Dorianne Laux

You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don't bother remembering
any of it. Let's stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by. — Dorianne Laux

I don't worry anymore about writing. There are times that I go through dry periods. I never go through a block. I'm always writing, but there are times where I'm just not on my game, and I'll use that time to read some new poets, go see some art, walk down to the river and just stare at it, or have a conversation with my sister, or whatever - do whatever it is that I do in my life, hoping that I'll get filled up enough. And something will happen, some juggling will happen and boom. — Dorianne Laux

I'm not the only person in the world who is suffering. I'm trying to talk to the world, responding to those voices. — Dorianne Laux

The more that accrues, the more depth, weight, and breadth we can bring to the poems, which we then need to throw overboard so we don't sink. — Dorianne Laux

That's how it is sometimes
God comes to your window,
all bright light and black wings,
and you're just too tired to open it. — Dorianne Laux

We're all writing out of a wound, and that's where our song comes from. The wound is singing. We're singing back to those who've been wounded. — Dorianne Laux

I am the flesh boat of my experiences, we all are , my feelings, thoughts, desires and dreams are captured in my body's pliant cells, fastened onto my DNA. — Dorianne Laux

W.S Merwin says "after three days of rain" and I write "After Twelve Days of Rain." I like his quietude. I admire his ability to be simple without being simplistic. — Dorianne Laux

We continue to speak, if only in whispers,
to something inside us that longs to be named. — Dorianne Laux

How not to imagine the tumors
ripening beneath his skin, flesh
I have kissed, stroked with my fingertips,
pressed my belly and breasts against, some nights
so hard I thought I could enter him, open
his back at the spine like a door or a curtain
and slip in like a small fish between his ribs,
nudge the coral of his brains with my lips,
brushing over the blue coil of his bowels
with the fluted silk of my tail. — Dorianne Laux

I write to invite the voices in, to watch the angel wrestle, to feel the devil gather on its haunches and rise. I write to hear myself breathing. I write to be doing something while I wait to be called to my appointment with death. I write to be done writing. I write because writing is fun. — Dorianne Laux

Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won't. — Dorianne Laux

Maybe it's what we don't say/that saves us. — Dorianne Laux

Death comes to me again, a girl
in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.
It's not so terrible she tells me,
not like you think, all darkness
and silence. There are windchimes
and the smell of lemons, some days
it rains, but more often the air is dry
and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase
built from hair and bone and listen
to the voices of the living. I like it,
she says, shaking the dust from her hair,
especially when they fight, and when they sing. — Dorianne Laux

If trees could speak they wouldn't — Dorianne Laux

How many losses does it take to stop a heart,
to lay waste to the vocabularies of desire? — Dorianne Laux

I love people and psychology. As a writer, I'm not so interested in Fred getting from the living room to the car. I want to go inside Fred's soul and play there. — Dorianne Laux

I try to avoid calling myself a poet because I think that's something someone else has to call you. It's like bragging. — Dorianne Laux

I don't know if we ever have enough distance to "see" our own trajectory. We're in the muddled middle of it. Who knows what will last, what poems will take hold of the imaginations of the future. — Dorianne Laux

Tinted Distances is a tender meditation that reveals a careful eye and steady devotion to elegy and ode. — Dorianne Laux

The changes that have occurred in poetry have been minor when you look at it over the scale of human time. It's like a rose, maybe a hybrid with color and size differentials, but the same genus, plucked from the same original blowsy family. — Dorianne Laux

The students always, always surprise me. — Dorianne Laux

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds. — Dorianne Laux

And I saw it didn't matter
who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone.
The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty
of the Iranian attendant, the thickening
clouds
nothing was mine. And I understood
finally, after a semester of philosophy,
a thousand books of poetry, after death
and childbirth and the startled cries of men
who called out my name as they entered me,
I finally believed I was alone, felt it
in my actual, visceral heart, heard it echo
like a thin bell. — Dorianne Laux

I have always loved too much,
or not enough. — Dorianne Laux

I also have my backpack of the tried-and-true, and because it is new to [my students], it becomes fresh to me again as well. — Dorianne Laux

The reason I started writing was because I was a little kid in San Diego who was getting beaten up by her dad and sexually abused and because I felt different than everybody else and I had this big huge secret that was tearing me apart. — Dorianne Laux

You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good. — Dorianne Laux

There's no word for what Young does, only for what he accomplishes-the capturing of small, daily miracles. — Dorianne Laux

You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake, ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs window. (from "Antilamentation") — Dorianne Laux

Every good poem asks a question, and every good poet asks every question. — Dorianne Laux

Joseph [Millar] is much more disciplined than I am. He's up every morning meditating, then he writes, and he reads throughout the day. He probably reads ten books to my two and writes twice as much as I do. — Dorianne Laux