Lucie Brock-Broido Quotes

I think American is very democratic in allowing different hues of language and parts of speech to commingle. William Logan once wrote that I had something of a fetish for what he called "Haute Couture Vulgarity."

Let me just say that the politics that I have are never the politics of poetics. I am not interested in politics. Politically, I am only very conscious of how we live and what we do right and what we do so awfully wrong.

I find it odd that, in real life people think I am funny but no one ever suspects that on the page! Personally, I think some of my work is a riot! I crack myself up, but I know that the poems seem so relentlessly dark.

I want a poem which is made of compression, passion, precision, symmetry, & disruption.

I am fascinated with criminal law because it is as rigorous as a poem and because it is based on what has been written down even before one has committed a crime.

Something I have "authority" on is animal rights. If I were not already so deep into the path I've taken, deep in the woods, I would probably work with animal rights activism because that's really where my heart lies. I think our relationships with animals are sacred and horrific. I've been a vegetarian since I was sixteen. What God said we are allowed to eat anything that does not have thumbs?

I wanted many of the poems to have long legs. At first I was calling them clothespin poems, before I knew what I was doing. The lines seem pulled on either end, tight and taut against the wind.

Every thing is changing every minute.

At the heart of my life is the idea that I don't ever want anything to ever change. That's the basic tenet.

Confession may well be a dirty word in poetry.

Poetry is the skin that I have between my body and the world's body.

I came to poetry because I felt I couldn't live properly in the real world.

I think the reason I've published so few books is that I have a pretty high expectation of self-reinvention between books and I would prefer to have been in this world and published fewer works than I would publishing the books that would reveal the process of the changes.

That's what interests me in poetry. That withholding, that white space, the pressure, and my long-term faith in violent concision, is still with me.