Jackson's Actions

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire. --Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC) <

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.
~Leonard Cohen

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
~John Cage

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
~Yevgeny Yentushenko, The Sole Survivor


The deception is that the work can remain tied to the writer, even that it expresses him or her. The finished piece belongs to the reader, not the writer. If the work is successful, the writer has to become invisible.
Stephen Dobyns, Best Words, Best Order

In looking for poems and poets, don't dwell on the boundaries of style, or time, or even of countries and cultures. Think of yourself rather as one member of a single, recognizable tribe...the differences you will find between then and now are interesting. They are not profound.
Mary Oliver,A Poetry Handbook


It [poetry] is a vehicle to move us from the smaller to the larger senses of destination: to move us out of our casual readerships, out of passing disregard, out of passivity itself, our habit of auto-immunity, and into that most mortal vulnerability: the capacity to respond.
Heather McHugh, Poets Teaching Poets


It is empathy that lets the poet take subjects from the world, then lets the reader find himself or herself within the subject and become a participant within the poem, since, after, all it is the reader's world, too. Some writers have such an abundance of empathy they never have to think about it; others must remind themselves constantly.
Stephen Dobyns from Best Words, Best Order

Poems are not read like novels. There is much pleasure to be had in take the same 14-line sonnet to bed with you and reading it many times over for a week. Savour, taste, enjoy. Poetry is not made to be sucked up like a child’s milkshake, it is much better sipped like a precious malt whiskey.
Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Traveled

Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow - whether there is a market for it or not! The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. I would tell all of you watching this screen: Before you go to bed, write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don't show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward.
Kurt Vonnegut

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.
Socrates