Rachel Zucker Quotes & Sayings

I agree that comedy does a good job - and is often about - stepping over the line - Lenny Bruce, etc. - and that this is important for a lot of poets too. I guess I feel like there has to be depth. — Rachel Zucker

I am only able to be honest. And sometimes my view of the world is pretty dark. But still funny. — Rachel Zucker

Very little of my time is spent thinking about poetry, except the time I spend in class. — Rachel Zucker

I love narrative and sometimes I feel frustrated with stand-up. — Rachel Zucker

Humor is essential to survival. Funny poems are vastly underrated. Very underwritten. — Rachel Zucker

a woman with young children is not a woman but a mammal, salve, croon, water carrier — Rachel Zucker

I think it's a huge shortcoming of mine - this disconnect between the world of human and animals. We are animals. — Rachel Zucker

I do not like it when other people dress up. I like everyone to be THEMSELVES. — Rachel Zucker

I love it when artists talk about process! I love the movie Comedian. — Rachel Zucker

I HATE HALLOWEEN. This makes me VERY unpopular. — Rachel Zucker

I have no lover, not even my love.
I have no other, not even I. — Rachel Zucker

I am interested in the movement of my own thoughts and in trying make the poems feel more accurate to experience, including the experience of thinking. — Rachel Zucker

When I edit the poems - and I do edit, which some people don't mean when they use the term "stream of consciousness" - I'm usually editing toward greater accuracy, which sometimes means more fragmentation, because that is the way I think. — Rachel Zucker

I almost never do free writing. Unless I am forcing my students to do it. — Rachel Zucker

I have a longing for wilderness and for greenness. I wish I were a person who longed for animals, but I'm not. — Rachel Zucker

I'm interested in the self. And in the limits and transformations of self. And in self presentation. And in doubt. And in playing with the audience's expectations. But I don't like dressing up like on Halloween. — Rachel Zucker

I don't remember ever dressing up for Halloween but I must have. I do not like dressing up at all. — Rachel Zucker

I think humor and terror are very closely related. — Rachel Zucker

My poetry definitely comes out of a female body. — Rachel Zucker

One of my greatest anxieties as a mother is head injuries. — Rachel Zucker

It's hard for me to find humor in my current non-writing situation. — Rachel Zucker

I'm in a hard place now. A very silent place. And I'm struggling to either accept this or drag myself out of it. — Rachel Zucker

Halloween means that young girls dress up in highly sexualized outfits that would never be acceptable if it weren't Halloween. — Rachel Zucker

Penises are literally all around me all the time, and have a lot of influence on the world, on my world. — Rachel Zucker

I don't write very much about penises. More than some poets but not perhaps as much as I should. — Rachel Zucker

Even if a poem is beautiful and memorable, it's not like an advertising jingle or propaganda, which attempt to convince and control. Poems seek to confuse, disabuse, enlarge understanding, and make people ask questions and think for themselves. — Rachel Zucker

Lizzie Harris's Stop Wanting is an unflinching book about a girlhood filled with violence, doubt, vulnerability, and loss. These gorgeously crafted and hauntingly memorable poems are a bleak place full of life, prayer, and the kind of answers only poems like these can provide. — Rachel Zucker

I was not popular enough - or at all - when Vanilla Ice was popular to remember who Vanilla Ice is without my husband reminding me. So I don't have a Vanilla Ice key chain. — Rachel Zucker

Usually I avoid sugar, but sugar is like the most deeply satisfying addictive thing ever. — Rachel Zucker

I'm even afraid of kittens. They bite too! But I respect animals. — Rachel Zucker

I really, really fear head injuries. But when people hit their heads in movies or fall down - I can't stop laughing. — Rachel Zucker

as I travel the city / hating poetry & my haircut & all the things I do not / want to do — Rachel Zucker

In high school my mother advised me to make my last lines into titles. It was very good advice. — Rachel Zucker

I like the way the prose and poetry interact. — Rachel Zucker

I love food too much - not because I'm fat but because it's so consumptionistic, etc. — Rachel Zucker

I do not like candy. I do not like knocking on strangers' doors. I do not like having to deal with the candy disaster that is Halloween. I resent it. — Rachel Zucker

I'm fascinated by but afraid of animals. — Rachel Zucker

Writing on the subway or anywhere is writing. Maybe it's all just writing. — Rachel Zucker