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Mary Jo Salter Quotes

Part of what the imagination does later in life is it's linking you not just to who you are now but to all the people you've been.

Part of what the imagination does later in life is it's linking you not just to who you are now but to all the people you've been.

Mary Jo Salter
People, Imagination, Who You Are

As poets, we're writing into the void, and we're not writing to be bestsellers. Whatever individual responses we get, whether at a reading, by a conversation or a letter, mean the world.

Mary Jo Salter
Reading, Writing, Mean

Money is that dear thing which, if you're not careful, you can squander your whole life thinking of.

Mary Jo Salter
Money, Thinking, Greed

And I said to myself, here's the problem with the world: The Italians are too Italian, and nobody else is Italian enough.

Mary Jo Salter
Italian, World, Problem

Writing is a bit like walking into a big bookstore. It's the bookstore of your brain, and you know you're never going to read all those books. It makes you happy you're in the bookstore, and you're nervous because you know you're never going to read all those books. So the nervousness is also happy. Once I get going writing poetry is one of the happiest things I do, but it is also fraught with all of these anxieties.

Mary Jo Salter
Book, Writing, Anxiety

Like a page dipped in ink, your cuff's in my coffee. / You have something to tell with unbuttoned sleeves.

Mary Jo Salter
Coffee, Ink, Cuffs
Mary Jo Salter (2013). “Open Shutters”, p.68, Knopf

The one concession I've made as I've gotten older is that my children are now adults and they're in their twenties and thirties and so I'm careful about how I write about them. I may write about them as a child, but I'm not going to write about their current struggles because they're adults and they can do it for themselves. I want to give them some space in a way I didn't when they were younger.

Mary Jo Salter
Children, Struggle, Writing

A number of people have written poems about Trump already, and I salute them. He is so beyond anything we could have imagined and yet, in another way, he has to be seen as a mirror of America. Our country wouldn't have elected him if he didn't reflect something in our country. In my view, it's a negative thing that's being reflected.

Mary Jo Salter
Country, People, Negative

Political poetry is the hardest thing to write because you cannot preach to the converted, and if you're only seeking to convert, then write an editorial. I hope I can write about Trump; he's too major a force not to be written about.

Mary Jo Salter
Writing, Political, Poetry Is

All writers know in advance that they are not going be able to reproduce in its wonderful fullness the thing that's in their heads; we're going to get some corner of it. We're going to do the best we can, but we already know it's beyond us.

Mary Jo Salter
Wonderful

I am a relatively rational being and I like to create order in poems. I like meter, I like rhyme, but ultimately I don't know where the poems come from, and I feel, at least in the beginning, that I'm taking dictation from my own dream that I don't remember.

Mary Jo Salter
Dream, Remember, Rhyme

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