A Quote by John Walter Bratton

This sorry poem
Isn't long
It's simply to say
I was wrong!! — © John Walter Bratton
This sorry poem Isn't long It's simply to say I was wrong!!
You say: 'Oh, please forgive' You say: 'Oh, live and let live.' But sorry doesn't help us. Sorry will not save us. Sorry is just a word you find so easy to say (so you say it anyway). Sorry doesn't help us. Sorry won't protect us. Sorry won't undo all the good gone wrong.
I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat contradiction in terms.
Love is saying you're sorry. It's the opposite of those cherub posters that say, 'Love is never having to say you're sorry.' Wrong! Love is three sorrys a day. If you haven't met that quota, something's wrong.
I write slowly, and I write many, many drafts. I probably have to work as hard as anyone, and maybe harder, to finish a poem. I often write a poem over years, because it takes me a long time to figure out what to say and how best to say it.
Every relationship has its lows and highs, but how you deal with it is important. There is nothing wrong with argument, but if I am wrong, I always say sorry, and same with Mahesh.
What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something.
I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.
I can be absolutely comfortable with an apocalyptic Jesus because he was simply wrong. As long as he's wrong I don't worry about him, and basically everyone else who was announcing in the year 2000 at midnight, the end of the world is coming, I expect them to be wrong. Now if they're right of course, I'll be very uncomfortable that night. But as long as everyone for 2000 years has been wrong about the apocalypse, I can be quite comfortable with it. It's space fiction.
Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet, and I'll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master... it's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.
I like the dance between sustained focus and digression that the long poem invites. A controlling metaphor helps to sustain the long poem.
It's when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order to simply make a poem, that you fail.
I'm sorry,' he says simply. 'People make mistakes, Gemma. We take the wrong action for the right reasons, and the right action for the wrong reasons.
I would not say I chose to write long poems on a conscious level. The long poem has been a relative constant.
A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry.
Say "thank you" when you're grateful and "sorry" when you're wrong.
It's not wrong to be upset. It's not wrong to cry. It's not wrong to want attention. It's not even wrong to scream or throw a fit. What is wrong is to keep it all inside. What is wrong is to blame and punish yourself for simply being human. What is wrong is to never be heard and to be alone in your pain. Share it. Let it out.
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