Quote

Poetry is the language of extremity. Poetry is a transfer of potency. You feel something potent and then you transfer it onto the page.

Li-Young Lee

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Li-Young Lee
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: August 19
Poet
Jakarta
Indonesia
Feels
Potent
Something
Transfers
Onto
Page
Pages
Poetry
Extremity
Language
Potency
Feel
Transfer

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A poem is like a score for the human voice.
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Brimming. That's what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming.
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A door jumps out from shadows, then jumps away. This is what I've come to find: the back door, unlatched. Tooled by insular wind, it slams and slams without meaning to and without meaning.
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The lyric self is the self the narrative self is not.
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I am that last, that final thing, the body in a white sheet listening.
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Our bodies look solid, but they arent. Were like a fountain. A fountain of water looks solid, but you can put your fingers right through it. Our bodies look like things, but theres no thingness to them.
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There are days we live as if death were nowhere in the background from joy to joy to joy, from wing to wing, from blossom to blossom to impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
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People who read poetry have heard about the burning bush, but when you write poetry, you sit inside the burning bush.
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Could it be in longing we are most ourselves?
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Some things never leave a person: scent of the hair of one you love, the texture of persimmons, in your palm, the ripe weight.
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Memory is sweet. Even when it’s painful, memory is sweet.
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While all bodies share the same fate, all voices do not.
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