Dinaw Mengestu Quotes

I am more interested in how people interpret the phrase 'Elect The Dead' than what I may or may not have intended. I named the album after the track, which is a spiritual song about love, life and death and is the heaviest song on the album without having any heavy instruments.

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive.

I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly - poetry, literature - this speculative attitude toward life.

Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.

I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.

One of my favorite poets, Neruda, writes close to the bone. Though I know only a little Spanish, I like to compare the Spanish and English lines and see how the translator worked.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem.

I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.

Often people, when they're confronted with a poem, it's like someone who keep saying 'what is the meaning of this? What is the meaning of this?' And that dulls us to the other pleasures poetry offers.

I love, loved, loved 'We Real Cool' by Gwendolyn Brooks.

To approach a poem as if it is a puzzle to be understood is to miss the point.

A poem, once it's written, is meant to be read with the inner voice of the person who reads it.

I ought to warn you that my verse is of no interest to people who can think.

Poems are taught as though the poet has put a secret key in his words and it is the reader's job to find it. Poems are not mystery novels.

I've had people explain to me what one of my poems meant, and I've been surprised that it means that to them. If a person can use a poem of mine to interpret her life or his life, good. I can't control that. Nor would I want to.

Introduction To Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

Why be in music, why write songs, if you can't use them to explore life or an idealized vision of life?

I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials.

How far we are going to read a poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers.

All poetry is difficult to read - The sense of it anyhow.

In Science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself.

To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.

If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless.