Quote

Poetry, for example, goes so deeply into the space between corporeal affect and deep emotion (even primal in some cases) that, as Emily Dickinson said, it can blow the top of your head off. Poetic language is sometimes misunderstood as abstract when in reality, it's precise - precisely the language of emotions and the body.

Lidia Yuknavitch

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lidia Yuknavitch
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: June 18
Author
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Language
Poetry
Precise
Reality
Deep
Poetic
Body
Cases
Affect
Sometimes
Emotion
Precisely
Dickinson
Even
Example
Abstract
Corporeal
Goes
Deeply
Emily
Head
Emotions
Primal
Space
Blow
Misunderstood

More quotes by Lidia Yuknavitch

Image
We live through sound and light—through our technologies.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
The memoir as a somewhat indistinct form is absolutely true. So many of the memoirs I've read, and the ones I have gravitated toward most, somehow upend what I expect from memoir and the project seems greater than just the exposition of a life.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
Birth is of course violent. Menstruation is violent. Trust me, if men's penises opened up once a month and shot blood, we'd be hearing about the violence of it.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
I love the walking contradiction of the body. I want to make corporeal characters, corporeal writing, I want to bring the intensities and contradictions and beauty and violence and stench and desire and astonishing physicality of the body back into literature.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
In water, like in books—you can leave your life.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
The practice of employing metaphor and image and composition and linguistic choices to move the reader through the content.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
Though I consider The Chronology of Water to be an anti-memoir for very precise reasons, it is an art form, and thus as open to critique as any other art form. Memoir has a form, formal strategies, issues of composition and craft, style, structure, all the elements of fiction or nonfiction or painting or music or what have you.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
I don't have much interest in writing if there are not opportunities to crack open the inherited forms. The writing I love to read most does this as well. I'm a form junkie.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
Make up stories until you find one you can live with.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
Your life doesn’t happen in any kind of order. Events don’t have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It’s all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
If I hadn't spent a big chunk of time in academia I might not have the depth of consciousness I do about ideas like that. I might think, for instance, that Freud was no big deal in terms of the shape of social organization then or now. I might think that the discourses of politics and law are real and stable and fair.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
I've noticed over the past years of my writerly life that women writers in particular are discouraged in cleverly disguised forms from including the intellectual in their creative material way more than you would believe.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
The convention of the coming-of-age story and the love story were literally abandoned - because they had to be - and a new kind of coming-of-age and love story emerged that required a different kind of telling the story.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
Memoirs have at their heart a content that happened to someone in real life. Is that what you are itching at in your question, so that if you are a reviewer or you are writing a critique you might feel as if you are stepping on someone's actual face?
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
Have endless patterns and repetitions accompanying your thoughtlessness, as if to say let go of that other more linear story, with its beginning, middle, and end, with its transcendent end, let go, we are the poem, we have come miles of life, we have survived this far to tell you, go on, go on.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
Only when I make movements away from the tribe of indie art and literature. Maybe that's something important for me to keep thinking about. What you gain, what you lose, why and how. Maybe the edge of the page is the place for me. Maybe that's OK.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
The rocks. They carry the chronology of water. All things simultaneously living and dead in your hands.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
I don't have any problem understanding why people flunk out of college or quit their jobs or cheat on each other or break the law or spray-paint walls. A little bit outside of things is where some people feel each other. We do it to replace the frame of family. We do it to erase and remake our origins in their own images. To say, I too was here.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
I drop to the curb like childhood leaving a body.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Image
The maternal impulse in animals to protect their young - that kind of instinct and subsequent violence is quite beautiful. Mythic even.
Lidia Yuknavitch