David Biespiel famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

I exaggerate. I oversimplify. I generalize. But thereâ€™s no cynicism here. American poetry is a mess. Long live American poetry.
-- David Biespiel

#Long #Cynicism #Mess
American poetry is a mess. Long live American poetry.
-- David Biespiel

#Long #Mess #Poetry Is
Poetry is an art spoken, as if sung, in relation to other human beings.
-- David Biespiel

#Art #Relation #Poetry Is
Campion is a poet who knows that what a poet sees is nothing without a mixture of formal prowess and emotional insight.
-- David Biespiel

#Emotional #Mixtures #Poet
My revision methods are chipping things away and moving them around and trying to get things right. I'm also open in my own writing to failure. I want to fail. I want to go to a place where I don't know what I'm doing, where maybe I'm lost. And in that uncertain space, I make decisions, and I know all those decisions are going to change everything else. And at a certain point, you just come to a place of rest. In revising, you reduce your options so that nothing is possible, and you just think, I can't change this anymore because I've already passed that decision point.
-- David Biespiel

#Moving #Writing #Thinking
I think that as poets, we can get away with stuff because we can ride on the melt of metaphor. We cover a lot of terrain psychically and temporally and linguistically via metaphor, and that can be a stand-in for an argument, whereas in prose, you have to make the argument, and you have to be convincing because the sequence must make sense in time and purpose.
-- David Biespiel

#Thinking #Purpose #Argument
Because so many poets have chosen a political idiom right now in the US and so many poets have assigned value and inherent knowledge to their racial identity and used that as a form of argumentation, I'm thinking now's a good time to buy low for my own poems and write poems that are deeply in the interior and the psyche. There are plenty of people out there working on subjects of political poetry, partisan poetry, all the way through to crossing the threshold of propaganda. I start thinking now's a good time for me to start writing about the myths of my own psyche.
-- David Biespiel

#Writing #Thinking #People
A writer's job is not complete without attention to precision. What you're trying to be precise about is your relationship to the observed thing. And "observed thing" could include remembered thing, fantasized thing, fictionalized thing, recorded thing, trans-altered thing. It's the model that's in front of you or in your brain or your memory or whatever. So you're trying to be precise about what it is you're seeing because it's very unlikely that you're going to be able to depict it as it is.
-- David Biespiel

#Memories #Brain #Trying
For a long time, I saw writing prose as chewing rocks compared to the velocities of writing poetry.
-- David Biespiel

#Writing #Long #Prose
Literary lineage is part of your autobiography. The authors are the literary base, the image base, the character base that you bring into your civilian work. Same with film, architecture, music, sports. That's one tributary of the autobiography.
-- David Biespiel

#Sports #Character #Architecture
I think I did experience culture shock. When I first arrived in Boston, I was basically told to go home. "Homeboy" is what they called me - very funny. I didn't take offense. I just thought, This is exactly where I want to be. The pace was different. Houston is a sprawling city. Boston is just crammed into the size of a postage stamp.
-- David Biespiel

#Home #Thinking #Different
There's not a big range in the political poetry of the last year, or not a political range. On the one hand, no poet that I know of who writes in English in the United States is anything but a humanist. So all poets, including myself, seem to be under that umbrella. We just don't have Rush Limbaugh poets, Ann Coulter poets.
-- David Biespiel

#Writing #Political #Poet

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