“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.”
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.
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Alice Oswald 2
British poet 1966Related quotes
“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
“The newspaper is a corporate symbolist poem, environmental and invisible, as poem.”
1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970)
Source: Money And Class In America (1989), Chapter 1, The Gilded Cage, p. 28
“We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.”
Source: The French Lieutenant's Woman
On writing as a woman in “INTERVIEW WITH ARIANA REINES” http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-ariana-reines/ in The White Review (July 2019)
The She-Ancient, in Pt. V
Source: 1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)
Context: Art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul. But we who are older use neither glass mirrors nor works of art. We have a direct sense of life. When you gain that you will put aside your mirrors and statues, your toys and your dolls.
