James Schuyler Quotes

Snow falling softly on lashes of eyes you love, and a cold cheek growing warm next to your own in hushed dark familial December.

What are the questions you wish to ask?

I do not usually revise much, though I often cut, particularly the end or toward the end of a poem

It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience)

In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively

I wish i could press snowflakes in a book like flowers.

One tends to write beyond what's needed

Looking at the sky last night and the moon in the first fresh dark, just a few stars, bright with their cold flares, I had a little crumpled thought, 'Oh well, the moon. It's just another place like California.' One's imagination drags its feet as we are inexorably hauled into the future.

It is always pleasant to learn that someone takes an interest in a work which one enjoyed writing

The aim of the poet, or other artist, is first to make something; and it's impossible to make something out of words and not communicate

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it.

A nothing day full of wild beauty .... Little fish stream by, a river in water.