Latest Dorianne Laux Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• The changes that have occurred in poetry have been minor when you look at it over the scale of human time. It's like a rose, maybe a hybrid with color and size differentials, but the same genus, plucked from the same original blowsy family.

  Dorianne Laux

  Color, Rose, Looks

• I don't know if we ever have enough distance to "see" our own trajectory. We're in the muddled middle of it. Who knows what will last, what poems will take hold of the imaginations of the future.

  Dorianne Laux

  Distance, Imagination, Lasts

• W.S Merwin says "after three days of rain" and I write "After Twelve Days of Rain." I like his quietude. I admire his ability to be simple without being simplistic.

  Dorianne Laux

  Rain, Writing, Simple

• It'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

  Smell, Feelings, Steel

• Joseph [Millar] is much more disciplined than I am. He's up every morning meditating, then he writes, and he reads throughout the day. He probably reads ten books to my two and writes twice as much as I do.

  Dorianne Laux

  Morning, Book, Writing

• The students always, always surprise me.

  Dorianne Laux

  Students, Surprise, Surprise Me

• We with my husband [Joseph Millar] are often the first reader for one another's work, and we often also have the last word. We trust each other. We have our past working life in common, our recombined families, as well as our life as teachers, and we read much of the same literature and have similar esthetics, so there's a simpatico there. But we do disagree and that can be fruitful, even if it's not so great in the moment.

  Dorianne Laux

  Teacher, Husband, Past

• I 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 Laux

  Students, Wells

• I feel deep gratitude for the life poetry has allowed me to live. I know the life I could have lived without it. Both on the physical plain, and the soul plain. Poetry helps us endure.

  Dorianne Laux

  Gratitude, Soul, Helping

• I share my life experiences as a poet with my students. My poetic difficulties, joys, struggles and discoveries. If I read a new poem or essay or book I'm excited about, I bring it in.

  Dorianne Laux

  Struggle, Book, Discovery

• When you have worked with people all day who have so little and struggle to make it stretch, who live outside the rarefied, you are humbled.

  Dorianne Laux

  Struggle, People, Littles

• I think what life experience has brought to my poems is compassion. When you work hard to make a living, raise a child up into the world, fail at marriage and try again, teach and fail, travel and fall, become ill, well again, weak but grateful, you learn patience, forbearance.

  Dorianne Laux

  Children, Fall, Grateful

• I am the flesh boat of my experiences, we all are , my feelings, thoughts, desires and dreams are captured in my body's pliant cells, fastened onto my DNA.

  Dorianne Laux

  Dream, Dna, Cells

• The more that accrues, the more depth, weight, and breadth we can bring to the poems, which we then need to throw overboard so we don't sink.

  Dorianne Laux

  Depth, Needs, Weight

• I would say my life experiences are my poetry, whether I'm writing about those actual, factual experiences or not.

  Dorianne Laux

  Writing, Life Experience, Factual

• We're all writing out of a wound, and that's where our song comes from. The wound is singing. We're singing back to those who've been wounded.

  Dorianne Laux

  Song, Writing, Singing

  "Road Trip". Interview with Ali Liebegott, logger.believermag.com. April 2, 2013.

• I'm not the only person in the world who is suffering. I'm trying to talk to the world, responding to those voices.

  Dorianne Laux

  Voice, Suffering, Trying

  "Road Trip". Interview with Ali Liebegott, logger.believermag.com. April 2, 2013.

• The reason I started writing was because I was a little kid in San Diego who was getting beaten up by her dad and sexually abused and because I felt different than everybody else and I had this big huge secret that was tearing me apart.

  Dorianne Laux

  Dad, Kids, Writing

  "Road Trip". Interview with Ali Liebegott, logger.believermag.com. April 2, 2013.

• If you want to be a writer in the world you really have to sit down and say, 'Why do I want to do this and why was I drawn to it to begin with?' And keep reminding yourself to return to that original impulse.

  Dorianne Laux

  World, Want, Down And

  "Road Trip". Interview with Ali Liebegott, logger.believermag.com. April 2, 2013.

• I try to avoid calling myself a poet because I think that's something someone else has to call you. It's like bragging.

  Dorianne Laux

  Thinking, Trying, Calling

  "Road Trip". Interview with Ali Liebegott, logger.believermag.com. April 2, 2013.