Frank Bidart Quotes & Sayings

Earth you know is round but seems flat. // You can't trust / your senses. — Frank Bidart

The stratagems by which briefly you
ameliorated, even seemingly
untwisted what still twists within you
you loved their taste and lay there
on your side
nursing like a puppy. — Frank Bidart

Sweet fiction, in which bravado and despair beckon from a cold panache, in which the protected essential self suffers flashes of its existence to be immortalized by a writing self that is incapable of performing its actions without mixing our essence with what is false. — Frank Bidart

Once you reach what is / inside it is outside. — Frank Bidart

Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves. — Frank Bidart

Though the body is its
genesis, a poem is the vision of a process
Out of ceaseless motion in edgeless space
Carved in space, vision your poor eye's single
armor against winter spring summer fall — Frank Bidart

(Poem on anorexic): The only way to escape the history of styles is not to have a body. — Frank Bidart

What takes place in me stays there. — Frank Bidart

Horrible the fate of the advice-giver in our culture: to repeat oneself in a thousand contexts until death, or irrelevance.
I abjure advice-giver. — Frank Bidart

We live in a hell of opinions. — Frank Bidart

Wanting to be a movie star ... answering an ad at ten or eleven. You made your mother drive you to Hollywood. — Frank Bidart

Up or down from the infinite C E N T E R
B R I M M I N G at the winking rim of time
the voice in my head said
LOVE IS THE DISTANCE
BETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVE — Frank Bidart

Insanity is the insistence on meaning. — Frank Bidart

The law is that you
must live
in the house you have built.
The law is absurd: it is
written down nowhere.
You are uncertain what crime
is, though each life writhing to
elude what it has made
feels like punishment. — Frank Bidart

Song
You know that it is there, lair
where the bear ceases
for a time even to exist.
Crawl in. You have at last killed
enough and eaten enough to be fat
enough to cease for a time to exist.
Crawl in. It takes talent to live at night, and scorning
others you had that talent, but now you sniff
the season when you must cease to exist.
Crawl in. Whatever for good or ill
grows within you needs
you for a time to cease to exist.
It is not raining inside
tonight. You know that it is there. Crawl in. — Frank Bidart

- No one knows why. Perhaps her mind,
ravenous, still insatiable, sensed
that to struggle with the shreds of a voice
must make her artistry subtler, more refined,
more capable of expressing humiliation,
rage, betrayal ...
- Perhaps the opposite. Perhaps her spirit
loathed the unending struggle
to embody itself, to manifest itself, on a stage whose
mechanics, and suffocating customs,
seemed expressly designed to annihilate spirit ...
- I know that in Tosca, in the second act,
when, humiliated, hounded by Scarpia,
she sang Vissi d'arte
- "I lived for art" -
and in torment, bewilderment, at the end she asks,
with a voice reaching
harrowingly for the notes,
"Art has repaid me LIKE THIS? — Frank Bidart

We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them change them and are changed. — Frank Bidart

I'm not a fool, I knew from the beginning
what couldn't happen. What couldn't happen
didn't. The enterprise is abandoned.
But half our life is
dreams, delirium, everything that underlies
that feeds
that keeps alive the illusion of sanity, semi-
sanity, we allow
others to see. The half of me that feeds the rest
is in mourning. Mourns. Each time we must
mourn, we fear this is the final mourning, this time
mourning never will lift. — Frank Bidart

The gestures poems make are the same as the gestures of ritual injunction - curse; exorcism; prayer; underlying everything perhaps, the attempt to make someone or something live again. Both poet and shaman make a model that stands for the whole. Substitution, symbolic substitution. The mind conceives that something lived, or might live. Implicit is the demand to understand. The memorial that is ward and warning. Without these ancient springs poems are merely more words. — Frank Bidart

The Old Man at the Wheel
Measured against the immeasurable
universe, no word you have spoken
brought light. Brought
light to what, as a child, you thought
too dark to be survived. By exorcism
you survived. By submission, then making.
You let all the parts of that thing you would
cut out of you enter your poem because
enacting there all its parts allowed you
the illusion you could cut it from your soul.
Dilemmas of choice given what cannot
change alone roused you to words.
As you grip the things that were young when
you were young, they crumble in your hand.
Now you must drive west, which in November
means driving directly into the sun. — Frank Bidart

To make a film you have to dream a film ... that's true of poetry as well. — Frank Bidart

Then the voice in my head said
WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE
OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS
REVOLT AGAINST IT
WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE — Frank Bidart

But being is making; not only large things, a family, a book, a business; but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between friends, a meal. — Frank Bidart

Play, and escaping the ideology one grew up in, is freedom. — Frank Bidart

Drugged to sleep by repetition of the diurnal
round, the monotonous sorrow of the finite,
within I am awake
repairing in dirt the frayed immaculate thread
forced by being to watch the birth of suns — Frank Bidart

Understand that when the beast within you
succeeds again in paralyzing into unending
incompletion whatever you again had the temerity to
try to make
its triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of its
rectitude. It knows that it alone
knows you. — Frank Bidart