Kim Addonizio Quotes

66/ 'Two roads diverge in a yellow wood,' I think. It didn't ultimately matter which one you took; that was the real point of Frost's poem. The roads were pretty much the same. That stuff about the one less traveled making all the difference was bullshit.

If your workshop praises a poem, don't think everyone is too nice to tell you how terrible it really is. (If it is that kind of workshop, you should get out of it as soon as possible - honest feedback is the sign that people respect your writing and take it seriously.)

33/ Though now that I think about it, the workshop that day was probably focused on revision, as in Your First Draft Sucks and You Have a Thousand Do-Overs Before You Get It Right. Think of it this way: Build a city, then blow it up to save it. Invent a road to take you far out of town, then start over with one good brick.

Love me like a wrong turn on a bad road
late at night.

Imagine a sentence as a hall with a series of doors. Each door is a possible way to use what you've already written to generate new material.

156/ I'd be very good at being rich, but no one has offered to test my talents in that department. ... New York was like a wealthy, handsome, intensely artistic, complex, slightly manic man who, for some inexplicable reason, was enthralled with me. Not that I ever met a man like that. Who needed men anyway? I'll take Manhattan.

I want to walk like I'm the only woman on earth and I can have my pick.

Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.

And finally
the glass that contains and spills this stuff continually
while the drinker hunches before it, while the bartender gathers
up empties, gives back the drinker's own face. Who knows what it looks like;
who cares whether or not it was young once, or ever lovely,
who gives a shit about some drunk rising to stagger toward
the bathroom, some man or woman or even lost
angel who recklessly threw it all over - heaven, the ether,
the celestial works - and said, Fuck it, I want to be human?

You were a town with one pay phone and someone else was using it.
You were an ATM temporarily unable to dispense cash.
You were an outdated link and the server was down.
You were invisible to the naked eye.
You were the two insect parts per million allowed in peanut butter.
You were a car wash that me as dirty as when I pulled in.
You were twenty rotting bags of rice in the hold of a cargo plane sitting on the runway in a drought-riddled country.
You were one job opening for two hundred applicants and you paid minimum wage.
You were grateful for my submission but you just couldn't use it.
You weren't a Preferred Provider.
You weren't giving any refunds.
You weren't available for comment.
Your grave wasn't marked so I wandered the cementary for hours, part of the grass, part of the crumbling stones.

131/ Writing a novel is like having a baby. I know because I've had both, and the experiences were hellish. By comparison, the torture of the damned - plunged into excrement, boiled in blood, beheaded, set upon by harpies - are like love nips from your yippy little dog.

Intimacy

The woman in the cafe making my cappuccino - dark eyes, dyed
red hair,
sleeveless black turtleneck - used to be lovers with the man I'm
seeing now.
She doesn't know me; we're strangers, but still I can't glance at her
casually, as I used to, before I knew. She stands at the machine,
sinking the nozzle
into a froth of milk, staring at nothing - I don't know what she's
thinking.
For all I know she might be remembering my lover, remembering
whatever happened
between them - he's never told me, except to say that it wasn't
important, and then
he changed the subject quickly, too quickly now that I think about
it; might he,
after all, have been lying, didn't an expression of pain cross his
face for just
and instant? I can't be sure. And really it was nothing, I tell myself;
there's no reason for me to feel awkward standing here, or
complicitous,
as though there's something significant between us.
She could be thinking of anything; why, now, do I have the sudden
suspicion
that she knows, that she feels me studying her, trying to imagine
them together? -
her lipstick's dark red, darker than her hair - trying to see him
kissing her, turning her over in bed
the way he likes to have me. I wonder if maybe
there were things about her he preferred, things he misses now
that we're together;
sometim

This is your genius: your own profound desire to write. Your love of words and language, your attempt to get to what poet Donald Hall called "the unsayable said." If

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath.

Like That"

Love me like a wrong turn on a bad road late at night, with no
moon and no town anywhere
and a large hungry animal moving heavily through the brush in
the ditch.
Love me with a blindfold over your eyes and the sound of rusty
water
blurting from the faucet in the kitchen, leaking down through
the floorboards to hot cement. Do it without asking,
without wondering or thinking anything, while the machinery's
shut down and the watchman's slumped asleep before his small TV
showing the empty garage, the deserted hallways, while the thieves
slice through
the fence with steel clippers. Love me when you can't find
a decent restaurant open anywhere, when you're alone in a glaring
diner
with two nuns arguing in the back booth, when your eggs are
greasy
and your hash browns underdone. Snick the buttons off the front
of my dress
and toss them one by one into the pond where carp lurk just
beneath the surface,
their cold fins waving. Love me on the hood of a truck no one's
driven
in years, sunk to its fenders in weeds and dead sunflowers;
and in the lilies, your mouth on my white throat, while turtles
drag
their bellies through slick mud, through the footprints of coots and
ducks.
Do it when no one's looking, when the riots begin and the planes
open up,
when the bus leaps the curb and the driver hits the brakes and the
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Out there people are working and arguing and laughing, living their beautiful, terrible lives, falling in love and having babies and being bored out of their skulls and feeling depressed, then being consoled by some little thing like watching the patterns the light makes through the leaves of trees, casting shadows on the sidewalks.
I remember the line from that poem now.
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

What Do Women Want?"

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I'm the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,
it'll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

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You Don't Know What Love Is
But you know how to raise it in me
like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to
wash off the sludge, the stench of our past.
How to start clean. This love even sits up
and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps.
Any day now she'll try to eat solid food. She'll want
to get into the fast car, one low to the ground, and drive
to some cinderblock shithole in the desert
where she can drink and get sick and then
dance in nothing but her underwear. You know
where she's headed, you know she'll wake up
with an ache she can't locate and no money
and a terrible thirst. So to hell
with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt
and your tongue down my throat
like an oxygen tube. Cover me
in black plastic. Let the mourners through.

Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best;
and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal
surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries,
or cherries, the rich spurt in the back
of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing.
Give me the lover who yanks open the door
of his house and presses me to the wall
in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I'm drenched
and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload
and begin their delicious diaspora
through the cities and small towns of my body.
To hell with the saints, with martyrs
of my childhood meant to instruct me
in the power of endurance and faith,
to hell with the next world and its pallid angels
swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.
I want this world. I want to walk into
the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along
like I'm nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass,
and I want to resist it. I want to go
staggering and flailing my way
through the bars and back rooms,
through the gleaming hotels and weedy
lots of abandoned sunflowers and the parks
where dogs are let off their leashes
in spite of the signs, where they sniff each
other and roll together in the grass, I want to
lie down somewhere and suffer for love until
it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again
and put on that little black dress and wait
for you, yes you, to come over here

I only want to walk a little longer in the cold blessing of the rain, and lift my face to it.

Love's merciless, the way it travels in and keeps emitting light.

The truth is that writing is simply not reliable. You can't count on it to be there just because you've made some space for it. In fact, making space might make it disappear. You tell yourself you can't write in the middle of your daily life, with all its distractions and commitments, and when you finally clear the decks, light off for someplace scenic or at least private, you sit there completely paralyzed. You have devoted yourself to writing, but it has not returned your devotion. If writing were a person, you would be in an abusive relationship. The healthy thing to do would be to get a restraining order and shut it right out of your heart.

All artists' work is autobiographical. Any writer's work is a map of their psyche. You can really see what their concerns are, what their obsessions are, and what interests them.