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Teachers at all levels encourage the idea that you have to talk about things in order to understand them, because they wouldn't have jobs, otherwise. But it's phony, you know.

Denise Levertov

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Denise Levertov
Age: 74 †
Born: 1923
Born: October 24
Died: 1997
Died: December 20
Poet
Translator
Writer
Ilford
London
Priscilla D Levertoff
Priscilla Denise Levertoff
Priscilla Denise Levertov
Understand
Teachers
Jobs
Otherwise
Order
Teaching
Ideas
Wouldn
Things
Teacher
Levels
Talk
Phony
Idea
Encourage

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The world is not with us enough. O taste and see.
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The vast silence of Buddha overtakes and overrules the oncoming roar of tragic life that fills alleys and avenues it blocks the way of pedicabs, police, convoys.
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But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go.
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In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.
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Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak of our own doubts, while dubiously we mother man in his doubt!
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Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.
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There is no savor more sweet, more salt than to be glad to be what, woman, and who, myself, I am.
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I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the life of the poem.
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Mediocrity is perhaps due not so much to lack of imagination as to lack of faith in the imagination, lack of the capacity for this abandon.
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my pleasure was in the strength of my back, in my noble shoulders, the cool smooth flesh cylinders of my arms.
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Mountain, mountain, mountain, marking time. Each nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering redefinition of horizon.
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Let the space under the first storey be dark, let the water lap the stone posts, and vivid green slime glimmer upon them let a boat be kept there.
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slowly the pale dew-beads of light lapped up from flowers can thicken, darken to gold: honey of the human.
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Images split the truth in fractions.
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One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.
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Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.
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Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August.
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At Delphi I prayed to Apollo that he maintain in me the flame of the poem and I drank of the brackish spring there.
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What joy when the insouciant armadillo glances at us and doesn't quicken his trotting across the track into the palm brush. What is this joy? That no animal falters, but knows what it must do?
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Wear scarlet! Tear the green lemons off the tree! I don't want to forget who I am, what has burned in me, and hang limp and clean, an empty dress -
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