“or that writing a poem you can read to no one
is like dancing in the dark.”
Source: The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters
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Ovid 120
Roman poet -43–17 BCRelated quotes

“Mark spoke like a poem and walked like a dance.”
Source: Bitter of Tongue
Get Writing (2004), as quoted in Modern Women Poets (2005) by Deryn Rees-Jones, p. 392
Context: Poems, like dreams, have a visible subject and an invisible one. The invisible one is the one you can't choose, the one that writes itself. Not a message that comes at the end of the poem, more like a pathological condition that deforms every word – a resonance, a manner of speaking, a nervous tic, a pressure. And this invisible subject only shows up when you're speaking the language that you speak when no one is there to correct or applaud you. Remembering that language is the whole skill of writing well.

"Hey! This Is What It's All About"
The Pill Versus the Springhill Mining Disaster

F 1
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

"To An Ungentle Critic"
Fairies and Fusiliers (1917)