C.D. Wright Quotes

#1. Readers have to be sought out and won to the light of the page, poem by poem, one by one by one.

C.D. Wright

#2. I believe the word used wrongly distorts the world.

C.D. Wright

#3. The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile.

C.D. Wright

#4. Everyone in their car needs love.

C.D. Wright

#5. Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life.

C.D. Wright

#6. Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances.

C.D. Wright

#7. Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.

C.D. Wright

#8. If religion, she also liked to say, is the opiate of the masses, fundamentalism is the amphetamine.

C.D. Wright

#9. If the incision of our words amounts to nothing but a feeling, a slow motion, it will still cut a better swath than the factory model, the corporate model, the penitentiary model, which by my lights are one and the same.

C.D. Wright

#10. I am suggesting that the radical of poetry lies not in the
resolution of doubts but in their proliferation

C.D. Wright

#11. Lead me, guide me to the light of your paper. Keep me in your arc of acuity. And when the ream is spent. Write a poem on my back. I'll never wash it off.

C.D. Wright

#12. Uniformity, in its motives, its goals, its far-ranging consequences, is the natural enemy of poetry, not to mention the enemy of trees, the soil, the exemplary life therein.

C.D. Wright

#13. Poetry is a necessity of life,

C.D. Wright

#14. It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.

C.D. Wright