C.D. Wright quotes:

It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.

The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile.

Everyone in their car needs love.

Uniformity, in its motives, its goals, its far-ranging consequences, is the natural enemy of poetry, not to mention the enemy of trees, the soil, the exemplary life therein.

Poetry is a necessity of life,

Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances.

Readers have to be sought out and won to the light of the page, poem by poem, one by one by one.

Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.

One opinion I share with the Dadaists is that art-making presupposes a revolutionary state of mind. Assimilating the practice into commodity or symbol of status nullifies its fundamental aims; therefore at the center of my own adherence to to this ranginess in taste is that it doesn't add up to membership in a private club. The differences choose me. There are so many approaches, so many innovative moves, so many oddly shaped ears in the field; may they never sing in unison.

Poetry requires deliberate movement in its direction, a filament of faith in its persistence, receptivity to its fundamental worthwhileness. Within its unanesthetized heart there is quite a racket going on. Choices have to be made with respect to every mark. Not every mistake should be erased. Nor shall the unintelligible be left out. Order is there to be wrenched from the tangles of words. Results are impossible to measure. A clearing is drawn around the perimeter as if by a stick with a nail on the end.

I am suggesting that the radical of poetry lies not in the resolution of doubts but in their proliferation

Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life.