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The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, ...more

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Nobody wanted your dance,Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your flounderingDrowning life and your effort to save yourself,Treading water, dancing th...more

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I had let it all grow. I had supposed It was all OK. Your lifeWas a liner I voyaged in.Costly education had fitted you out.Financiers and committees a...more

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Black was the without eyeBlack the within tongueBlack was the heartBlack the liver, black the lungsUnable to suck in lightBlack the blood in its loud ...more

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T.S. Eliot said to me 'There’s only one way a poet can develop his actual writing – apart from self-criticism & continual practice. And that is by rea...more

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Keep your whole being on the thing you are turning into words. The minute you flinch, and take your mind off this thing, and begin to look at the word...more

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There is the inner life, which is the world of final reality, the world of memory, emotion, imagination, intelligence, and natural common sense, and w...more

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Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it,...more

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I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised...more