Carolyn Kizer Quotes

#1. Poets are interested mostly in death and commas.

Carolyn Kizer

#2. You write for the people in high school who ignored you. We all do.

Carolyn Kizer

#3. What is so marvelous about living today is that it is possible to extend, like a flower, spreading petals in all directions.

Carolyn Kizer

#4. As I remember, the first real poem I wrote was about the wheat fields between Spokane and Pullman, to the south.

Carolyn Kizer

#5. I discovered it was easier to carry around a pen than a piano.

Carolyn Kizer

#6. We stared out at the city that hummed and glittered like a computer chip deep in some unknowable machine, holding its secret like a poker hand

Janet Fitch

#7. I've been enormously fortunate. People say, 'How do you feel about your reputation?' My real belief is that I have exactly the reputation I deserve ... on the whole, I feel comfortable with myself.

Carolyn Kizer

#8. A city is a place that can offer maximum freedom. Otherwise it's incomplete.

Ai Weiwei

#9. I was raised to be a girl Michelangelo.

Carolyn Kizer

#10. A poet, to whom no one cruel and imposing listens, / Disdained by senates, whispers to your dust,

Carolyn Kizer

#11. I didn't learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems - dreams, myth, history - from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.

Carolyn Kizer

#12. I tell people I never got to hear Dylan Thomas read because my husband wouldn't let me, because he thought it would be a sort of bad influence. People say, 'And you didn't go?' They're so surprised because the me they know would have gone. And I say I was very much a 'yes, dear' wife.

Carolyn Kizer

#13. She tended to be impatient with that sort of intellectual who, for all his brilliance, has never been able to arrive at the simple conclusion that to be reasonably happy you have to be reasonably good.

Carolyn Kizer

#14. I wrote poetry off and on in high school, when I could manage to get out of gym classes and sports - using my allergies as an excuse - and climb the hill behind school till I found a nice place to settle down with a notebook and look at Spokane spread out below.

Carolyn Kizer

#15. We live in wonder, blaze in a cycle of passion and apprehension.

Carolyn Kizer

#16. Nature is not slow to equip us in the prison uniform of the party to which we adhere.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#17. He said, "You have pigs in this poem; pigs are not poetic." I got up and walked out of that class and never went back.

Carolyn Kizer

#18. Environmental concerns and feminism are locked together. Generally, women have closer connections to the organic nature of our lives.

Carolyn Kizer

#19. What is it that brings on these moods of yours?
Nothing mysterious: the ordinary pain of being alive.

Charles Baudelaire

#20. Poets are interested primarily in death and commas.

Carolyn Kizer

#21. You cannot meet someone for a moment, or even cast eyes on someone in the street, without changing. That is my subject.

Carolyn Kizer

#22. I get very frustrated by this term 'genre exercise.' I mean, what exactly is that? Genre is not really relevant when you are writing a song; hopefully you are doing it to explore something, to create something, and I don't agree that any of my albums are genre exercises.

Elvis Costello

#23. I used to get so many letters from students about the ending of 'Pro Femina.' So I had a stamp made that said 'irony, irony, irony' to put on a postcard and mail it back.

Carolyn Kizer

#24. I happen to believe that there are a lot of good poets around at present, but a poet like Alex Kuo, who possesses a highly developed moral sense and a bitter honesty, is rare at any time and especially in this time. We need him.

Carolyn Kizer

#25. No matter how brief an encounter you have with anybody, you both change.

Carolyn Kizer