I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.
Interpretation
Poets embrace reality with love, while prose writers invent new worlds.
Mary Karr's quote suggests that poetry is rooted in an appreciation for the existing world, celebrating its beauty and complexities. In contrast, prose writing often involves creating fictional realms, allowing authors to explore narratives that differ from our own reality, thereby reflecting the power of imagination in literature.
In practice
During a poetry reading, one might inspire the audience by quoting this line to discuss the nature of poetic expression.
There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there.
Mother’s particular devils had remained mysterious to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth’s direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free.
I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.
Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You're three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down.
Reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.
My idea of art is, you write something that makes people feel so strongly that they get some conviction about who they want to be or what they want to do. It's morally useful not in a political way, but it makes your heart bigger; it's emotionally and spiritually empowering.
Shh. Listen to the sounds that surround you. Notice the pitches, the volume, the timbre, the many lines of counterpoint. As light taught Monet to paint, the earth may be teaching you music.
Ah, music, sacred tongue of God! I hear thee calling and I come.
Every year, Hollywood is looking for that new, white leading man and new white starlet that audiences fall in love with. But they're not looking for the next Denzel Washington, Will Smith or Sidney Poitier.
The groove is so mysterious. We're born with it and we lose it and the world seems to split apart before our eyes into stupid and cool. When we get it back, the world unifies around us, and both stupid and cool fall away. I am grateful to those who are keepers of the groove. The babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all.
I feel that buildings often have a workaday aspect that you see during the daylight hours, and a more resplendent side that emerges after dark.
Don't write about Man; write about a man.
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