Latest Martha Ronk Quotes from Interviews

• For me, failure has to be acknowledged, needs to be faced in some way.

  Martha Ronk

  Needs, Way

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• One of the things I've always thought is that if I were to write a poetics, it would have to do with the poetics of failure, and the way in which all the things that you claim or that you try for are already based on the limits of language.

  Martha Ronk

  Writing, Trying, Way

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• Language is as fragile as the little alpine plant.

  Martha Ronk

  Littles, Language, Plant

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• I think those of us who use language are always trying for this, trying to keep everything from floating away by trying to write about it despite failure.

  Martha Ronk

  Writing, Thinking, Always Trying

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• I want literature to open all the doors that I can't open by myself, and to allow me to see things that I wouldn't otherwise see.

  Martha Ronk

  Doors, Literature, Want

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• I try to attach myself to things around me so that they don't slip away.

  Martha Ronk

  Trying, Slips

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• I'm in California, so I know people who are natives who tell me there's lots of weather here, but it's not the same as being in Vermont. Since I grew up on the East Coast I miss that weather all the time. You'd think I'd get used to not having it, but I don't.

  Martha Ronk

  Thinking, Weather, California

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• Often poets fall into groups that exclude others, and don't pay attention to those who write in different ways. It seems so limited to me.

  Martha Ronk

  Fall, Writing, Groups

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• Looking out a window from different vantage points changes what you see and therefore what you write.

  Martha Ronk

  Writing, Different, Vantage Point

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• The days start to be charged not because tomorrow you're leaving, but because in three weeks you're leaving. The future impinges. So you start to think about the frame.

  Martha Ronk

  Thinking, Leaving, Three

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• You can get a sense of the wonderful power of framing by holding your fingers up in a kind of square, walking around the room and framing it differently - how that changes the nature of what you think the room is like.

  Martha Ronk

  Thinking, Squares, Rooms

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• I prefer always to think that I am creating a book, not a series of stand-alone poems.

  Martha Ronk

  Book, Thinking, Creating

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• I can't move my body slowly. I can't move the line slowly. So I end up with way too much, often opaque to me later.

  Martha Ronk

  Moving, Body, Opaque

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• A number of poems don't work alone. They need to fit together to work.

  Martha Ronk

  Numbers, Together, Needs

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• I know that in some ways I operate from a kind of antiquated interest in imagery, while many contemporary poets are not so interested in imagery. I think part of it is my training, and just my visual sense of things.

  Martha Ronk

  Thinking, Training, Way

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• I spend a lot of time revising. I'm not somebody who can move slowly.

  Martha Ronk

  Moving, Revising

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• One of the reasons I like immersing myself in different texts, putting myself in the company of other writers, is that they do change your vocabulary. They change what you write about or they change the length of lines.

  Martha Ronk

  Writing, Vocabulary, Different

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• Each of us is present, but partially.

  Martha Ronk

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• I'm always somehow drawn to that sense of how fragile things are and how a garden means so differently depending upon whose language you happen to be in or whose century you happen to be in.

  Martha Ronk

  Mean, Garden, Language

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• I think about the kinds of gardens that Queen Elizabeth put up. She made gardens in the shape of an "E," for Elizabeth, just one more way in which she used symbolism to solidify her reign: appearing as the Virgin Queen, for example, or wearing a dress embroidered with eyes and ears to indicate that she knew all that was going on in her castle; she had spies.

  Martha Ronk

  Queens, Eye, Garden

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• Shakespeare, of course, makes us ever aware of transience, not only in the sonnets, but also powerfully in his plays - spectacles for a brief period of time and then gone, as when Prospero describes the pageant fading, leaving "not a rack behind."

  Martha Ronk

  Play, Leaving, Gone

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• I've always been interested in the fragility of things, and with special urgency now because of climate change, but also because of the accidents of reading.

  Martha Ronk

  Reading, Special, Climate

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• If it's a drop of dew, it will dissolve.

  Martha Ronk

  Dew, Ifs

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• Gardens do offer a temporal tableau and certainly mean differently in different eras and indeed geographies (think of the formal gardens in France).

  Martha Ronk

  Mean, Garden, Thinking

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

• Our mind is dark in some way, and so we use rhetoric as a kind of prop or foil.

  Martha Ronk

  Dark, Mind, Use

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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