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We aren't suggesting that mental instability or unhappiness makes one a better poet, or a poet at all and contrary to the romantic notion of the artist suffering for his or her work, we think these writers achieved brilliance in spite of their suffering, not because of it.

Dorianne Laux

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Dorianne Laux
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: January 10
Poet
Writer
Augusta
Maine
Artist
Romantic
Makes
Contrary
Better
Mental
Instability
Writing
Notion
Suggesting
Work
Writers
Brilliance
Think
Aren
Unhappiness
Thinking
Poet
Achieved
Suffering
Spite

More quotes by Dorianne Laux

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Someone spoke to me last night, told me the truth. Just a few words, but I recognized it. I knew I should make myself get up, write it down, but it was late, and I was exhausted from working all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Dorianne Laux
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W.S Merwin says after three days of rain and I write After Twelve Days of Rain. I like his quietude. I admire his ability to be simple without being simplistic.
Dorianne Laux
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Every poem I write falls short in some important way. But I go on trying to write the one that won’t.
Dorianne Laux
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The more that accrues, the more depth, weight, and breadth we can bring to the poems, which we then need to throw overboard so we don't sink.
Dorianne Laux
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Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.
Dorianne Laux
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The reason I started writing was because I was a little kid in San Diego who was getting beaten up by her dad and sexually abused and because I felt different than everybody else and I had this big huge secret that was tearing me apart.
Dorianne Laux
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We continue to speak, if only in whispers, to something inside us that longs to be named.
Dorianne Laux
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If you want to be a writer in the world you really have to sit down and say, 'Why do I want to do this and why was I drawn to it to begin with?' And keep reminding yourself to return to that original impulse.
Dorianne Laux
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You are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good.
Dorianne Laux
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Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won't magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them -- consciously and unconsciously -- your style will develop.
Dorianne Laux
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We're all writing out of a wound, and that's where our song comes from. The wound is singing. We're singing back to those who've been wounded.
Dorianne Laux
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I also have my backpack of the tried-and-true, and because it is new to [my students], it becomes fresh to me again as well.
Dorianne Laux
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I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live. I know the life I could have lived without it. Both on the physical plain, and the soul plain. Poetry helps us endure.
Dorianne Laux
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Tinted Distances is a tender meditation that reveals a careful eye and steady devotion to elegy and ode.
Dorianne Laux
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That's how it is sometimes--God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you're just too tired to open it.
Dorianne Laux
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I am the flesh boat of my experiences, we all are , my feelings, thoughts, desires and dreams are captured in my body's pliant cells, fastened onto my DNA.
Dorianne Laux
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I think what life experience has brought to my poems is compassion. When you work hard to make a living, raise a child up into the world, fail at marriage and try again, teach and fail, travel and fall, become ill, well again, weak but grateful, you learn patience, forbearance.
Dorianne Laux
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I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I'm writing about those actual, factual experiences or not.
Dorianne Laux
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I have always loved too much, or not enough.
Dorianne Laux
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You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake.
Dorianne Laux