"Speaking Straight Ahead" ~about what concerns us

"In a poem as in any writing the backbone of it is to have something to say, to say it and to quit. You don't stop to fill in a pattern. The movement of the thought appears in the movement of the structural make-up."

--p. 180, William Carlos Williams, in Something to Say, William Carlos Williams on Younger Poets, edited with an introduction by James E.B. Breslin (A New Directions Book, 1985).

"We do not realize how far back we have to go before we find good wood . . . . We have not gone back to the language itself, letting it dictate its forms."

--p. 3, William Carlos Williams, in William Carlos Williams, Harold Norse, The American Idiom, A Correspondence, ed. John J. Wilson (Bright Tiger Press, 1990).

"In all the disquisitions you have heard concerning the happiness of life, has it every been recommended to you to read poetry? . . . . You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket. You will never have an idle our." --p. 260. John Adams, writing to John Quincy Adams. Quoted in John Adams, by David McCullough (Simon & Schuster, 2001).

"When is description mere? Never. A freshness in the seeing, an innocency in the vision, the angle of perception, the bringing together of details, not necessarily as metaphors, even, just as objects. Be one of those on whom, as Lawrence said, nothing is lost. Don't strain for arrangement. Look and put it down and let your sensibility be the sieve." --p. 120. Theodore Roethke, "I Teach Out of Love," On Poetry and Craft (Copper Canyon Press, 2001).