Quotes from James Dickey and Paul Blackburn (Patricia)

“…What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe. If you love it, there’s just no substitute for it. I mean, you read a great line, or somebody’s great poem, well, it’s just there! I also believe that after all the ages and all the centuries and all the languages, that we’ve just arrived at the beginning of what poetry is capable of.

All of the great poets: the Greek poets, the Latins, the Chinese, the French, German, Spanish, English—they have only hinted at what could exist as far as poems and poetry are concerned. I don’t know how to get this new kind of sound, or this new kind of use in language, but I am convinced that it can be done by somebody, maybe not by me, but by somebody.

I feel about myself as a writer like John the Baptist did, when he said, ‘I prepare the way for one who is greater than I.’ Yeah, but look who it was!”

--James Dickey

“I wouldn’t even know whether a poem was finished or not unless my ear told me. I think music must be in the poem somewhere. Poetry is traditionally a musical structure. Now that forms are as open as they are, each poem has to find its own form. It has to do with the technique of juxtaposition and reading from the breath line and normal speech raised to its highest point. But that’s abstracting a principle. When you’re writing, these things are at the back of your mind. It’s almost as through your technique is in your wrists and you’re sitting at a typewriter instead of a piano.

As far as I’m concerned, people who don’t hear the poems are missing a good deal, and a poet who doesn’t hear his own poems is missing everything.”

--Paul Blackburn