A Quote by Dan Quisenberry

Someone told me just recently that poets are eulogists. It's their job, to eulogize. I didn't know that, but it makes sense. Because in almost every poem of mine there is a loss.
When words become a poem, it makes sense to me, but I don't know how to explain to someone why the words are the way they are. It's just the logic of the poem to me.
How do I think of you? As someone I want to be with. As someone as young as me, but "older," if that makes sense. As someone I like to look at, not just because you're good to look at, but because just looking at you makes me smile and feel happier. As someone who knows her mind and who I envy for that. As someone who is strong in herself without seeming to need anyone else to help her. As someone who makes me thinks and unsettles me in a way that makes me feel more alive.
It's difficult to put your own bare ass out on the limb every time you sit down to write a poem. But that's really sort of the ideal. Because if we don't discover something about ourselves and our world in the making of a poem, chances are it's not going to be a very good poem. So what I'm saying is that a lot of our best poets could be better poets if they wrote less and risked more in what they do.
The incredible cinematography makes 'A Walk to Beautiful' almost like a poem; there is a tenderness on display that seems to emanate from the camera. There is also great sensitivity to the women whose stories are being told - never did I have a sense of the subjects being exploited.
I feel like the older I get, the truer it feels that I'm only going have an investment in a poem if it allows or forces me to bring something that's supremely me onto the page. I used to think that the speaker of a poem was talking to someone else, to some ideal reader or listener, but now I think that speakers - poets - are talking to themselves. The poem allows you to pose questions that you have you ask of yourself knowing that they are unanswerable.
I told my mum recently, when I used to envisage my adulthood, it was just me working at a corner shop that mum and dad could drive me to and pick me up from. I couldn't ever imagine living on my own and having a job that I wanted to do. Because I never saw it.
Book sense makes sense because someone has gone through it before and able to share it with you. Your job is to listen and discern.
I've always been more than a little mystified by poets who seem to think talking to people as directly as possible is a bad thing. I mean, I don't want to set up a straw man here: I understand that for many poets - and for me, at times - writing truly means writing in a way that is difficult, simply because the poem is trying to grasp for something elusive. So the difficulty of the poem is just unavoidable, and not in any way artificially imposed. So "as possible" is the key part of the phrase above, I suppose.
Truck drivers stop me and say, 'What is the poem for the day?' or 'Give me a poem for my girl.' I have one on almost every subject.
I have a hard time with awards shows in general because I've never been part of the conversation. I just show up to work and do my job because I love the job and I love the people I get to make TV with. When someone wants to applaud it more than just watching it, that makes me somewhat uncomfortable.
I think that public grieving is a good thing. People need to be grieved; loss needs to be acknowledged publicly, because it helps to confer a sense of reality on the loss but also because it makes it known that this was a real life.
The weight loss came about because a buddy of mine who was diagnosed with diabetes because of his obesity told me that I was fat. And I started laughing, and he was like, 'No seriously, you're fat.' And I said, 'Oh wow, really.'
I have never received full credit from the SPLA [Sudanese People's Liberation Army], because the men are very sexist and feel that I'm acting out of place, bringing too much attention to myself - but for the funeral of our leader John Garang, they had me write the poem "Chol Apieth" to eulogize him, and that was their way of acknowledging my contributions.
I know that I'm a real writer because sometimes I write a story just because I want to; not because someone's told me to.
Most poets who have little or nothing to say are concerned primarily with the way in which they say it ... if it is true that the style of a poem and the poem itself are one, ... it may be ... that the poets who have little or nothing to say are, or will be, the poets that matter.
Most of the time, when someone tells you something, and it makes sense, it just makes sense. And that's that. But sometimes it really doesn't make sense.
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