Marie Howe Quotes

I called her name into the fold between night and day.

I am living. I remember you.

Bedeviled, / human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words / that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled / among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.

Someone hanging clothes on a line between buildings, someone shaking out a rug from an open window might have heard hammering, one or two blocks away and thought little or nothing of it.

We tell each other stories to help each other live. That's why I read poetry. I read poetry to stay alive. That's why I went to poetry in the first place, that's why I stay with it, that's why I'll never leave it.

Without devotion any life becomes a stranger's story ... told for the body to forget what it once loved.

I remember a man, a very lonely man, coming up to me at the end of a reading and looking into my face and saying, 'I feel as if I have looked down a corridor and seen into your soul.' And I looked at him and said, 'You haven't.' You know, Here's the good news and the bad news: you haven't! I made something, and you and I could look at it together, but it's not me; you don't live with me; you're not intimate with me. You're not the man I live with or my friend. You will never know me in that way. I'm making something, like Joseph Cornell makes his boxes and everyone looks into them, but it's the box you look into; it's not the man or the woman. It's alchemy of language and memory and imagination and time and music and sounds that gets made, and that's different from 'Here is what happened to me when I was ten.

My soul drank enough to know how thirsty it was. This

--One day it happens: what you have feared all your life,
the unendurably specific, the exact thing. No matter what you say or do.

Part of Eve's Discussion
It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand,
and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still
and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when
a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop,
very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like
the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say,
it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only
all the time.

Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable ... The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.

Memory is a poet, not an historian.

Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we're going to die,

Sometimes I open a book that's so beautiful I have to shut it because it hurts me. I can't stand it. It's like, Oh no! Oh no! Oh no! This is going to drive me into my own heart. A day or two days later I'm saying, All right, and I just surrender to it: Do it to me. Go ahead. I want it. I don't want it. I want it. I don't want it.

When we think we have something to say we are usually wrong. We are fooling ourselves. Trip into discovery. Don't write what you know, discover something new.

Poetry is telling something to someone.