F O O T N O T E

A friend, who will soon publish his heartcracking memoir, told me I should write one of my own. My roommate raised her eyebrow and said, Then you'll really have to change your name.

Sylvia Plath said, For me, poetry is an evasion of the real job of writing prose.

But

Marie Howe said, He was 90 pounds, he was going to be dead in three days, and he held my hand and said: Maria, this is not a tragedy. She said, They're love poems; they're not grief poems.

Jack Gilbert said, How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,/and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,/God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words/get it all wrong. Lucille Clifton said, Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

Rainer Maria Rilke said, Believe that with your feelings and your work you are taking part in the greatest; the more strongly you cultivate this belief, the more will reality and the world go forth from it.

Laure-Anne Bosselaar said, I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. She said also, I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at everyone.

Jane Kenyon said, The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in such a beautiful way, that people cannot live without it.

And Marie Howe said, I read poetry to stay alive.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.