Poets From New York City

"Climb the stairway of your imagination"

"We are in danger of forgetting that God is not only a comfort but a joy. He is the source of all pleasures; he is fun and laughter, and we are meant to enjoy him."

"We sometimes come to God, not because we love him best, but because we love our possessions best; we ask Christ to "save Western civilization," without asking ourselves whether it is entirely a civilization that Christ could want to save. We pray, too often, not to do God's will, but to enlist God's assistance in maintaining our "continually increasing consumption." And yet, though Christ promised that God would feed us, he never promised that God would stuff us to bursting."

"She is incredibly articulate. She means what she says and she says what she means. Her metaphors are what make her poetry, and they ring true."

"Death hallows what it touches. This is a truth to which every heart, not utterly divested of the better feelings of our nature, will yield a ready assent; and he who violates the sanctuary of the grave is looked upon by all who acknowledge this truth as little less sacrilegious than the wretch who profanes the temple of his God. If such is the general feeling towards him who disturbs the sleep of the common dead—of beings unloved in life—and bound to him by no dearer tie than that of mere humanity; how lively must be the indignation, how deep the abhorrence and how bitter the denunciations against him who stands forth the accuser of his earliest, dearest friend: the revealer of follies and of crimes which—though they draw tears of blood from him in secret—should be hidden, as the miser hides his treasure, from the knowledge of the world, and who brands with eternal infamy that name which above all names has the power of reviving in his heart the buried recollections of his infant years! And that wretched being am I! But the task which I have assumed—though Heaven knows how unwillingly!—however it may wring my heart, I dare not shrink from the performance of."

"The core and the surface Are essentially the same Words making them seem different Only to express appearance. If name be needed, wonder names them both: From wonder into wonder existence opens."

"I am a miser of my memories of you"

"A man who knows how little he knows is well, a man who knows how much he knows is sick."

"My generation really grew up at a very scary time. This time is probably twice as scary, but since we didn't know this time was coming-the Second World War was coming, the Spanish Civil War was happening when I was in high school. Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia and made all those idiotic statements that are famous to this day. Like how beautiful it was to bomb the Ethiopians. The Italian kids in my school were in heaven, they were so delighted and proud they were fainting with joy. It was a scary time. Hitler was coming inch by inch by inch. I remember my parents talking about it. (1985)"

"One of the horses history rides is language. Fifteen years ago, maybe ten, in my fifties, I wouldn't have noticed the word mankind at all. And here in 1986, a six-year-old person heard the word in all its meaning. (1985)"

"I'm really involved in a lot of feminist anti-militarist work. I've linked things together with my anti-war stuff. Many feminists don't see it that way, by the way. There are a lot of divisions. Women say that's not feminism; feminism is equal rights, day care, battered women, abortion. But they don't see the connection between the patriarchy of militarism and the patriarchy of ordinary daily life. They don't like that patriarchy but they don't seem to mind so much the patriarchy of intervention in Central America. (1985)"

"All of art is political; if a writer says this is not political, it's probably the most political thing that he could be doing. That's a statement of an alienation problem. I would say that my interest in ordinary life and how people live is a very political one. That's politics; that's what it is. (1982)"

"Someone like Mary Daly doesn't even know how people live-but other women, I think they come from suburban lives or something like that, and no family. That's a certain kind of life but it's not general female life. (1981)"

"I'd been writing poetry until about 1956, and then I just sort of made up my mind that I had to write stories. I love the whole tradition of poetry, but I couldn't figure out a way to use my own Bronx English tongue in poems. I can now, better, but those early poems were all very literary; they picked up after whatever poet I was reading. They used what I think of as only one ear: you have two ears, one is for the sound of literature and the other is for your neighborhood, for your mother and father's house. (1982)"

"I always think that the writer's role is to get off her or his ass and to get on the street and do something. But that answer does not satisfy people. But to me that's a very important thing. (1985)"

"I am ambitious, but it's a long-range thing with me. I have my confidential sights on a star, but there's half a lifetime to get to it. Meanwhile I keep my eyes open and am well dressed."

"I brought up lonesomeness again, and not being understood at all except by some women everybody hated."

"People move around too much, and they become afraid to speak their own language. (1980)"

"My last girl was Jewish, which is often a warm kind of girl, concerned about food intake and employability. They don't like you to work too hard, I understand, until you're hooked and then, you bastard, sweat!"

"With a few grasping, kind words and a modern gimmick, she hoped to breathe eternity into a mortal matter, love."

"I sighed in and I groaned out, so as to melt a certain pain around my heart. A steel ring like arthritis, at my age."

"I was happy, but I am now in possession of knowledge that this is wrong. Happiness isn't so bad for a woman. She gets fatter, she gets older, she could lie down, nuzzling a regiment of men and little kids, she could just die of the pleasure. But men are different, they have to own money, or they have to be famous, or everybody on the block has too look up to them from the cellar stairs."

"It is still hard to believe that a man who sends out the Ten Commandments every year for a Christmas card can be so easy buttoning and unbuttoning."

"He settles in the kitchen because the children are asleep all over the rest of the house. I unknot his tie and offer him a cold sandwich. He raps my backside, paying attention to the bounce. I walk around him as though he were a Maypole, kissing as I go."

"I thought of praying for divine guidance in line with the great spiritual renaissance of our time. But I am all thumbs in that kind of deciduous conversation. I asked myself, did I, as God's creature under the stars, have the right to evade an event, a factual occurrence, to parry an experience or even a small peradventure."

"The organization of his ideas was all wrong; I was drawn to the memory of myself -- a mere stripling of a girl -- the day I learned that the shortest distance between any two points was a great circle."

"I thank you, Papa, for your kindness. It is true about me to this day. I am foolish but I am not a fool."

"In no time at all his cheerful face appeared at the door of the spring dusk. In the street among peaceable strangers he did a handstand. Then easy and impervious, in full control, he cartwheeled eastward into the source of night."

"I never think about marriage. I never write about marriage. I do think a lot about family. I think about love and family (1980)"

"I think people have writer's block because they don't really write things down. Their minds are too linear. You have blocks when either you have nothing to write about or you are just going dead ahead. If you just write, if you realize what your mind is and that it's always working, you're always wondering, you're always curious, you're always thinking about things. (1980)"

"Like a good and happy man increasing his virtue, he kissed her. She did not move away from him. She remained in the embrace of his right arm, her face nuzzling his shoulder, her eyes closed. He tipped her chin to look and measure opportunity. She could not open her eyes. Honorably he searched, but on her face he met no quarrel."

"Peter sighed. He turned the palms of his hands up as though to guess at rain. Anna knew him, theme and choreography. The sunshiny spring afternoon seeped through his fingers. He looked up at the witnessing heavens to keep what he could. He dropped his arms and let the rest go."

"I think a lot of what influences a writer is what you hear in the street, the language you hear, the way people talk, the way, the rhythms, the song, the language of your childhood. (1980)"

"We made for him a great dinner of honor. At this dinner I said to him, for the last time, I thought, "Goodbye, dear friend, topic of my life, now we part." And to myself I said further: Finished. This is your lonesome bed. A lady what they call fat and fifty. You made it personally. From this lonesome bed you will finally fall to a bed not so lonesome, only crowded with a million bones."

"Every day in our neighborhood there were whole apartments, beds, bureaus, kitchen tables out on the street. We understood that this was because of capitalism, which didn't care that working people had no work and no money for rent."

"Concentration is really a problem for me. To seize something. But when I really have a story I'm working on, I can work on it sitting in a train, going to Washington, any place, anywhere. It's totally absorbing. (1980)"

"the world may not last. Just the other day Ronald Reagan said that the arms race is necessary. He has to be insane. INSANE! And all the people listening. They have to be insane too. (1980)"

"you're in love many times in your life, several times in one's life. And romantic love is very... a lot of fun, I don't want to knock it. With all the troubles that come afterward, and it may all be a lie and imposed on us, but falling in love is peachy. And if it can happen to you, boy, that's great. And if it doesn't, then by all means, you should stick to your friends. (1981)"

"I begin every class, for instance, with the reading of poems, of something somebody thinks is beautiful. Like sort of a ritual, like saying grace, or thank you God, or something. Somebody comes in and picks up a poem and reads a poem by George Herbert or reads a poem by almost anybody. Somebody read two pages of Faulkner yesterday. I want them to read something they love. So at least two poems are read at the beginning of class-or fiction. (1986)"

""Can you think of a writer (besides Chekhov) who is holy and an artist?" "Grace Paley." She (Mary Gordon) smiled. "Well, yes." Obviously."

"I don't see television the way most people do. I see it as a destroyer of concentration rather than of language. There's dead language everywhere. We're cut off from the truth of our tongues. (1980)"

"Heroes: Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, Shirley Chisholm — what a generation!"

"People's imagination has been changed a lot by television. (1980)"

"("Do you write when you have to? Or when do you write?") GP: I write all the time, in a way. I'm not a very disciplined person. I write. I wrote yesterday, a little. Writing is a habit, among other things, and if you're a writer you'd better get into the habit. A lot of people don't realize that. When I'm writing a story then I'm really writing all the time, wholly involved in it. When I'm not writing a story, I'm still thinking....Susan Sontag once said that she can't wait to get to a typewriter so she'll know what she thinks! And that's true for most writers, that you really have gotten this habit of thinking on paper. Until you do that all you have is a lot of junk in your head, a lot of stuff swirling around, and the paper is the place where you really begin to think. (1979)"

"Grace Paley says, "By the third line, I know whether it's going to turn into a poem or a story. With poems, I talk to people. In stories, they talk to me.""

"if you’re going to be involved with the Left, you’ve got to start thinking about Israel. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz and I became very committed to supporting the Women in Black in ‘87. I formed a group here, the Jewish Women’s Committee to End the Occupation (JWCEO) with Clare Kinberg and Grace Paley. We wanted to be identified as Jews protesting."

"things are in motion. Grace Paley has said, when people stand up, other people discover they've got legs. While there are limits to this kind of analogy (not everyone can stand, or has legs for that matter), the motion is unmistakeable."

"The best training is to read and write, no matter what. Don’t live with a lover or roommate who doesn’t respect your work. Don’t lie, buy time, borrow to buy time. Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write."

"people joke about leaflet prose, but I've been writing and reading leaflets and I challenge my sister and brother writers to try to write a leaflet that moves people to action. I've seen it done. The Women's Pentagon Action statement, written in 1980 by Grace Paley in collaboration with dozens of women, actually inspired a lot of us to take action."

"Writing poetry, which for me was then saying how I felt about this and that, didn't help me to understand the world I lived in. I developed a definition-which I think becomes less and less accurate as poetry moves into the world-that poetry was a way of speaking to the world, but fiction was a way to get the world to speak to me. (1978 interview)"