Tony Leuzzi Quotes

Writing is not always a priority. . . .I only write those things that are necessary for me to write. I love to write, and when I'm not writing, I often feel as if I'm betraying my art, my gift, my calling, but that sensation is probably hubris or neurosis as much as anything else. The problem, and one of the joys of writing poetry, is that none of us can really count on entering the canon. The chances are that none of our work will survive long after we're gone. That's just the way it is. To feel otherwise is foolish. we write in competition with the dead for the attention of the unborn. We are writing poems that are trying to take the attention of people away from Sappho, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Baudelaire. Good luck to you! There's a built-in failure to writing poetry that I find comforting.
If you know you're doomed to failure, then you can work freely. People who think their work is going to last, or that it matters, well . . . I always try to disabuse my students of their desire to write for fame. I ask them, "Who here has read Shakespeare?" Everyone raises his or her hand. We agree that his work is immortal, then I remind them: "he's still dead. He's as dead as he'd have been if you hadn't read him; and you'll be dead too someday, no matter how well you write." To sacrifice your life for your art is an appalling notion. On the other hand, I have been called to be a poet, ad it's an unimaginably rich gift. Like every artist, I know that in order to be a moral, eff

You have a poem called "Bad Theology." What would you call a bad theology?
I guess any theology that presumes to have God in its pocket. Can I explain this without sinning further? We'll find out. The community in which I was raised did what they would call theology, but it was always a kind of cranky, brutal reduction of lush and beautiful complexities into the lowest common denominator, the dullest version. But when I went away to school and started reading more, I became increasingly dissatisfied with any theology that replaces the enormous, immeasurable real with very measurable and very calculated replacements. I'm not saying this very eloquently, but I guess bad theology articulates as definitive and conclusive that which is unknowable and without end.

[A]rt can't ever be programmatic ... it needs on the contrary to be complicating, subtle, questioning, doubtful and doubting.

[I]f we could imagine a world without slavery and abolish that institution, then we can face the troubles we have now ... Who was it that imagined a world where the Nazis could be defeated?There were those who looked upon that war machine and said: this can and must be destroyed.That resistance ... began with an act of the imagination. Resistance begins with the imagination.

Robert Frost didn't like to explain his poems - and for good reason: to explain a poem is to suck the air from its lungs. This does not mean, however, that poets shouldn't talk about their poetry, or that one shouldn't ask questions about it. Rather, it suggests that any discussion of poetry should celebrate its ultimate ineffability and in so doing lead one to further inquiry. I think of that wonderful scene from Elie Wiesel's memoir, Night, where Mosche the Beadle of the local synagogue, in dialogue with the young, precocious author, explains: Every question possesses a power that does not lie in the answer.