Mary Jo Salter Quotes

And I said to myself, here’s the problem with the world: The Italians are too Italian, and nobody else is Italian enough.

As poets, we’re writing into the void, and we’re not writing to be bestsellers. Whatever individual responses we get, whether at a reading, by a conversation or a letter, mean the world.

I am a relatively rational being and I like to create order in poems. I like meter, I like rhyme, but ultimately I don’t know where the poems come from, and I feel, at least in the beginning, that I’m taking dictation from my own dream that I don’t remember.

Like a page dipped in ink, your cuff’s in my coffee. / You have something to tell with unbuttoned sleeves.

Part of what the imagination does later in life is it’s linking you not just to who you are now but to all the people you’ve been.

All writers know in advance that they are not going be able to reproduce in its wonderful fullness the thing that’s in their heads; we’re going to get some corner of it. We’re going to do the best we can, but we already know it’s beyond us.