John Fuller Quotes

I'm not sure about prizes. I don't know how far you can seriously raise public consciousness about poetry. Having a 'National Poetry Day,' like a 'No Smoking Day,' is just shelving the problem. Things which should by rights be every day are not best served by these things.

It's always good to show that poetry isn't the little depressed lyric people believe it to be, that it's something bigger.

100,000,000 Guinea Pigs sparked a rising wave of consumer indignation. But ... it takes a major catastrophe to carry legal and enforcement action over the hump of lethargy and inaction ... Today, nearly forty years later, the situation is worse, not better.

It is the unspecified 'you' of modern love poems that I am mostly concerned with here. At least, the addressee is commonly a lover, and the very fact that the name is withheld is offered as a guarantee of the closeness and significance of the relationship.

The things about you I appreciate
May seem indelicate:
I'd like to find you in the shower
And chase the soap for half an hour.
I'd like to have you in my power
And see your eyes dilate.
I'd like to have your back to scour
And other parts to lubricate.
Sometimes I feel it is my fate
To chase you screaming up a tower
Or make you cower
By asking you to differentiate
Nietzsche from Schopenhauer.
I'd like successfully to guess your weight
And win you at a fête.
I'd like to offer you a flower.

I like the hair upon your shoulders,
Falling like water over boulders.
I like the shoulders too: they are essential.
Your collar-bones have great potential
(I'd like your particulars in folders
Marked Confidential).

I like your cheeks, I like your nose,
I like the way your lips disclose
The neat arrangement of your teeth
(Half above and half beneath)
In rows.

I like your eyes, I like their fringes.
The way they focus on me gives me twinges.
Your upper arms drive me berserk.
I like the way your elbows work.
On hinges …

I like your wrists, I like your glands,
I like the fingers on your hands.
I'd like to teach them how to count,
And certain things we might exchange,
Something familiar for something strange.
I'd like to give you just the right amount
And get some change.

I

When I began, poetry was very academic. You published little pamphlets from fancy presses. It was rather ... chaste. There wasn't much public reading. Then there was poetry and jazz, which I don't think worked, though I love jazz.

Poetry surprises us with what we already know.

Hmmm. I think a lot of people can write poems that are howls of anguish. I think I've probably written such things and then torn them up.