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Jean Valentine and Jane Cooper were my professors at Sarah Lawrence College - and they were uncompromised in their art. They gave me models of how to live one's life as a poet.
Denise Duhamel
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Denise Duhamel
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: January 1
Poet
Writer
Woonsocket
Rhode Island
Gave
Lawrence
Poet
Cooper
College
Jean
Art
Sarah
Live
Valentine
Life
Jane
Professors
Models
More quotes by Denise Duhamel
The spoken word community was significant in making me want to write accessible and urgent poems. Bob Holman, in particular, was an impressive figure.
Denise Duhamel
I love going to movie theaters, even in the era of movies on-demand and Netflix. When you are in a movie theater, no one can reach you by phone or other means.
Denise Duhamel
I also could see myself as a stand-up comedian, a fashion designer (for people of all sizes), a hairdresser, an earnest and eventually burnt-out politician, or the owner of a small bistro. But I fear that, without poetry, I would have simply been going through the motions.
Denise Duhamel
While poetry was less professionalized than it is now, I still had this urge to win prizes and see my work in magazines, to get an A, as though poetry could be graded. I wish I had been more patient and less frantic about getting published.
Denise Duhamel
The biggest poems I ever made are based on the psychological principal of the Johari Window: what the self freely shares with others what the self hides from others what others hide from the self and what is unknown to the self and others.
Denise Duhamel
Over the years, I became more and more interested in the forms and techniques in which things could be said.
Denise Duhamel
The truth is the poem itself. Just because someone writes a poem about a feeling she has does not mean that the feeling will stay forever. The truth of the emotion of the poem remains, even if the particular truth of the poet changes.
Denise Duhamel
I believe it's impossible to write good poetry without reading. Reading poetry goes straight to my psyche and makes me want to write. I meet the muse in the poems of others and invite her to my poems. I see over and over again, in different ways, what is possible, how the perimeters of poetry are expanding and making way for new forms.
Denise Duhamel
I am open to squeezing in whatever I can in this wonderful life. Instead of asking, Is that all there is? I seem, lately, to be always saying, Wow!
Denise Duhamel
I have no idea, actually, where I fit in, in terms of poetry camps. At AWP conferences, I have been on panels about humor, collaboration, visual poetry, confessional poetry, gender, and the body, as well as tributes to Edward Field and Albert Goldbarth. I felt at home on all of them - most poets straddle more than one school.
Denise Duhamel
Though it does seem like I have written an immense amount of work, over the years I have pushed the pause button. I have poems that I haven't sent out for publication, mostly based on political/social issues.
Denise Duhamel
What has stayed true in my life as a writer is my dedication to writing - I try to write every day, no matter what - and the joy that writing has given me.
Denise Duhamel
As a teenager, I loved acting, painting, photography, and making films with my friend's Super 8 camera. But I always loved writing the best. I chose writing even before I knew poetry was available to me.
Denise Duhamel
I know writers for whom the act of writing is a necessary chore. They suffer to write great work. I am very lucky that for me writing is a delight.
Denise Duhamel
Writing is performative - and while, yes, the words in essence will be there forever, poems are often about ecstatic moments rather than trying to pin down a particular truth of an event.
Denise Duhamel
If you are my friend and say to me, Please don't write about this, I won't.
Denise Duhamel
I am interested in the confines of the page and busting through/off the page as well. A writer must let go of the line when writing prose poems, which brings its own pleasures.
Denise Duhamel
I started wanting desperately to say something, to make a point, to be heard - and I still feel that way. Free verse served me best when I embarked on poetry.
Denise Duhamel
Unlike Woody Allen, I would be happy to be part of any (poetry) club that would have me.
Denise Duhamel
My advice to my younger self would have been, Chill. Concentrate on the poems. Everything else will work itself out.
Denise Duhamel
