Pattiann Rogers Quotes

People sometimes think that defining a term is pedantic and useless, but terms need to be defined if they're going to be discussed, even if the terms are only defined for a single conversation. Those involved in the conversation need to know how the terms are being used.

I think the language of science is highly lyrical and evocative and an important part of our lives in many ways.

I love the language. I'm just totally fascinated by the sound and the look of words and the kinds of cadences you can create with them, the various kinds of music.

As far as I can tell, writing the essays didn't change the way I wrote poetry. Although the essays contain scattered passages that might be called lyrical, they often contain closed statements of what is only suggested in the poetry.

I'm all in favor of poets telling about the process as much as they can. And many do.

Mothers,fathers,our kind,tell me again that death doesn't matter.Tell me it's just a limitation of vision ,a fold of landscape,a deep flax-and-poppy-filled gully hidden on the hill, pleat in our perception a somersault of existence,natural,even beneficent even a gift,the only key to the red-lacquered door at the end of the hall,"water within water," those old stories.

The poem is a process, a way for me to discover questions, to ask them clearly or to discover the results of certain suppositions. Suppositions are a form of questioning.

Often when I write poetry I don't quite know what I'm saying myself. I mean, I can't restate the poem. The meaning of the poem is the poem.

I like poetry because poetry - even in free verse - is formal, and it has to be very concise and packed and rich, and I like the feeling of having to do that, having to make the language tight and still free, as if the deepest freedom is created by the restrictions.

Poetry uses language to create a music borne inside human experiences and emotions.

Ordering is very important with essays, even if a reader doesn't read the essays or the poems in order through the book.

When the music created by the sounds and ordering of the words matches the thrust of the meanings of the words, then a radiant state of awareness can occur.

What triggers a poem for me is not the same as what triggers an essay. My mind is geared to looking for, or to watching out for, the image that attracts my attention or the phrase or the strange juxtaposition that strikes me bodily, or an odd question or supposition.

I approach writing a poem in a much different state than when I am writing prose. It's almost as if I were working in a different language when I'm writing poetry. The words - what they are and what they can become - the possibilities of the words are vastly expanded for me when I'm writing a poem.

I see my poems as interlinked. No poem gives an answer. It may offer other questions, it may instigate other questions that then become poems.

I've spent much of my life being attuned to watching for an image or a phrase that can trigger what might be a poem - could become a poem.

I think my prose - mine and that of others - sometimes slips into a cadence or rhythm that can replicate or come close to the music in a wonderful poem, and then it returns to the sound of prose.

From the beginning I felt that I didn't ever want to leave the impression that the process of writing a poem is totally mysterious. I couldn't explain everything that went on in the creation of a poem, but I could try to explain as much as I knew. I thought readers deserved that. I didn't want to set myself apart as being someone special.

To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem.

If I'm excited by something bodily, and curious about it, I generally want to delve into it and explore it with poetry. That's the way I ordinarily watch the world around me.

How can I appreciate light from an aging
sun shining through new configurations neither pine
nor ash? How can I extol the nuturing
fragrances from the spires, the spicules
of a landscape not yet formed or seeded?

In poetry I can let the language go, allow an image that seems out of place to enter and see what happens, always listening to the music that's being created, just like the world around us, never predictable, always shifting and intertwining, reflecting and echoing itself.

My object when writing prose is to write as clearly as possible. I think I know what I'm saying in prose, and I want others to understand it and to be able to restate it.

One of the most important differences I see between prose and poetry is the music of the language.

Statement Preliminary to the Invention of Solace

Whether they bend as compliantly as black leaves
Curved and hanging in the heavy dew in the grey dawn,
Or whether they wait as motionless as ice-coated
Insects and spears of roots on a northern cliff;

Whether they tighten once like the last white edge
Of primrose taken suddenly skyward
By a gust of frost, or swallow as hard as stones
Careened and scattered by a current of river;

Whether they mourn by the bright light of grief
Running like a spine of grass straight through the sound
Of their songs, or whether they fall quietly
Through indefinite darkness like a seed of sorrel
Bound alive beneath snow;

whether they mourn in multitudes, blessed
like a congregation of winter forest moaning for the white
drifting children of storms they can never remember,
or whether they grieve separately, divided
even from themselves, parted like golden plovers blown
and calling over a buffeted sea;

something must come to them, something as clear and fair
and continuous as the eye of the bluegill open in calm water,
something as silent as the essential spaces of breath
heard inside the voice naming all of their wishes,

something touching them in the same way the sun deep
in the pit of the pear touches the spring sky by the light
of its own leaf. A comfort understood like that

We're all vulnerable in our various ways, and what we are physically, our bodies, is what has developed with the goal of keeping that life safe and intact, at least until we have procreated. That's what our bodies are, the protection of life.

I don't write or think too much about the word "salvation." I might; I probably should. We are such needy creatures, needing to be saved, to feel we are saved or might be, however we define ourselves, however we define that word.

The silences express so much and are so crucial in music, and prose does not allow for the creation of these silences, these white spaces on the page or the computer screen.

I think parts of my soul have been saved by my writing, not in the sense of escaping death, but escaping the death of the moment, perhaps.

In I Praise My Destroyer, Diane Ackerman demonstrates once again her love for the specific language that rises from the juncture of self and the natural world, and her skillful use of that language. Whether she turns her attention to the act of eating an apricot 'the color of shame and dawn,' or to 'the omnipotence of light,' or to grief when 'All the greens of summer have blown apart,' her linking of unique images, her energetic wit and whimsy, her compassionate investment in life, always bring new pleasures and perceptions to the reader.

Death Vision

I think it's a multiplication of sight,
Like after a low hovering autumn rain
When the invisible web of funnel weaves
And sheetweb weavers all at once are seen
Where they always were, spread and looping
The grasses, every strand, waft and leaf-
Crest elucidated with water-light and frost,
completing the fullest aspect of field.

Or maybe the grace of death is split-second
Transformation of knowledge, an intricate,
Turning realization, as when a single
Sperm-embracing deep ovum transforms,
In an instant, from stasis to replicating,
Star-shifting shimmer, rolls, reaches,
Alters its plane of intentions, becomes
A hoofing, thumping host of purpose.


I can imagine not merely
The falling away of blank walls
And blinds in that moment, not merely
A shutter flung open for the first time
Above a valley of interlocking forests
And constellations but a sweeping,
Penetrating circumference of vision
Encompassing both knotweed bud
And its seed simultaneously, seeing
Blood bone and its ash as one,
The repeated light and fall and flight
Of hawk-owl and tundra vole
As a union of origin and finality.

A mathematics of flesh and space might
Take hold if we ask for it in that last
Moment, might appear as if it had always
Existed within the eyes, translucent,
Jewel-like in stained gla