Tinted Distances is a tender meditation that reveals a careful eye and steady devotion to elegy and ode.
Dorianne LauxThat's how it is sometimes--God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you're just too tired to open it.
Dorianne LauxI write to invite the voices in, to watch the angel wrestle, to feel the devil gather on its haunches and rise. I write to hear myself breathing. I write to be doing something while I wait to be called to my appointment with death. I write to be done writing. I write because writing is fun.
Dorianne LauxI also have my backpack of the tried-and-true, and because it is new to [my students], it becomes fresh to me again as well.
Dorianne LauxYou are not your poetry. Your self-esteem shouldn't depend on whether you publish, or whether some editor or writer you admire thinks you're any good.
Dorianne LauxIt's difficult to talk about [W.S.] Merwin's poems, as it's hard to talk about a feeling or a smell. It is what it is, but so much so that it overwhelms both sense and the senses. I aspire to something about his work, that imbues his poems, though I'm not sure I could say what that is. A purity, maybe, the kind of purity that comes from being beaten, like steel.
Dorianne Laux