J. D. McClatchy famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

No poem should be an urn to contain a meaning, but a net to catch what meanings float through the day.
-- J. D. McClatchy

#Should
A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants you to understand things only years later.
-- J. D. McClatchy

#Years #Secret #Ironic
The best criticism is the sort that tells you what you already know but had been reluctant to accuse yourself of.
-- J. D. McClatchy

#Criticism
Novelists want to flood, poets want to distill.
-- J. D. McClatchy

#Novelists #Want #Poet
To shelter and to hide, they have resigned themselves.
-- J. D. McClatchy

#Shelter #Forests
At least since Darwin's day, we have known that all of us originally emerged from the sea. That fact may account for our abiding fascination with it, our longing to return there, whether to sail the main or merely contemplate its restless enormity.
-- J. D. McClatchy

#Sea #Fascination #Abiding
I prefer formal techniques, and use sonnets and rhyme, any manner of scheme to give a shape and order-of feeling as well as argument-to a poem. But all my life, I've also been a person who's made his bed in the morning and picks up the bath mat. That's what I mean by temperament. Whether genetic or acquired, I have a disposition to arrangements. One is born with this, as if with blue eyes or a weak heart. Do you think Allen Ginsberg ever put the cap back on his toothpaste?
-- J. D. McClatchy

#Morning #Eye #Heart

Once a leader delegates, he should show utmost confidence in the people he has entrusted.
You should not be carried away by the dictation of the mind, but the mind should be carried by your dictation.
Death should take more care with his paperwork.
When they are assailed by despair, young people should let universal concerns into their lives.
He did say I fascinated him, but he really should have clarified to me that I was just the fascination for the day.
How should they answer?
Why to mute fish should'st thou thyself discoverAnd not to me, thy no less silent lover?
Wanting to work is so rare a merit, that it should be encouraged.
Jihad should be waged in places where there is war. Bombings in places where there is no war is not a good thing.
He who fears to weep, should learn to be kind to those who weep.

J. D. McClatchy famous quotes

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