I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.
Interpretation
Poets embrace reality with love, while prose writers invent new worlds.
Mary Karr's quote suggests that poetry is rooted in an appreciation for the existing world, celebrating its beauty and complexities. In contrast, prose writing often involves creating fictional realms, allowing authors to explore narratives that differ from our own reality, thereby reflecting the power of imagination in literature.
In practice
During a poetry reading, one might inspire the audience by quoting this line to discuss the nature of poetic expression.
There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there.
Mother’s particular devils had remained mysterious to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth’s direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free.
I was 40 years old before I became an overnight success, and I'd been publishing for 20 years.
Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You're three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down.
Reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.
My idea of art is, you write something that makes people feel so strongly that they get some conviction about who they want to be or what they want to do. It's morally useful not in a political way, but it makes your heart bigger; it's emotionally and spiritually empowering.
Two questions I can't really answer about fiction are 1) where it comes from, and 2) why we need it. But that we do create it and also crave it is beyond dispute.
It was not the story of design or clothes, it was the fantasy of women that made me want to work in fashion.
I don't understand why the press is so interested in speculating about my appearance, anyway. What does my face have to do with my music or my dancing?
I don't do fashion, I AM fashion.
But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.
You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life
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