Quote of the Day

Poetry has content, public as well as private. It has content not available elsewhere. That is why no good poets are dumb.

—Marvin Bell, “The Impure Every Time”

Quote of the Day

I like to see visible indications of mentality in poems: the poem proceeding intelligently as well as sensefully. But I prefer that the subject matter not be the intelligence…We know now that poetry is a quality of imagination and language inextricably bound up with the recognizable world. We know that it’s a kind of flying, that it gets up and goes.

—Marvin Bell, “The Impure Every Time”

The poem you are writing

We have gone back to thinking of poetry as something more than a bundle of techniques. Which is to say that we have gone back to emphasizing that there is something more to poetry than accomplishment…The literary career is sometimes a hideous notion. It brings out the worst in critics and reviewers. It develops cliques and antagonistic loyalties when what a poet most needs is to learn from that which most opposes him or her, most disturbs, most confronts…Good poems transcend these problems, and we find them. More to the point, the act of writing transcends everything for those of us who need to write. They can take away from you everything but this: the poems you have written, the poems you are writing.

—Marvin Bell, “The Impure Every Time”

Quote of the Day

I choose poetry. I choose the ugly as well as the beautiful, knowing it will all be beautiful soon enough. I choose the unknown (for now), the mystery rather than the accepted solution, the cracked bowl over the flawless one, the voice that has a little spit and phlegm in it, the used shoes, imagination over analysis, Williams over Stevens, the impure every time.

—Marvin Bell, “The Impure Every Time”