Top 21 Frank Bidart Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Earth you know is round but seems flat. // You can't trust / your senses.
Frank Bidart
#5. Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves.
Frank Bidart
#6. (Poem on anorexic): The only way to escape the history of styles is not to have a body.
Frank Bidart
#7. 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
#8. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Once you reach what is / inside it is outside.
Frank Bidart
#13. 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
#14. We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them change them and are changed.
Frank Bidart
#16. Play, and escaping the ideology one grew up in, is freedom.
Frank Bidart
#17. To make a film you have to dream a film ... that's true of poetry as well.
Frank Bidart
#18. 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
#20. 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
#21. Wanting to be a movie star ... answering an ad at ten or eleven. You made your mother drive you to Hollywood.
Frank Bidart
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