Franz Wright

The poetic prose that most interests me is that of Henri Michaux. ”

I used to comfort myself with the idea of a book with serrated, detachable pages, so that you could read the thing the way it came and then shuffle the pages, like a giant deck of cards, and read the book in an entirely different order. It would be a different book, wouldn't it? It would be one of infinite books. ”

I am in no way different from anyone else, that my predicament, my sense of aloneness or isolation may be precisely what unites me with everyone. ”

I've always envied people who compose music or paint, because they don't have to be bothered with the sort of crude mess that language normally is, in everyday life and in the way we use it. ”

What I myself experience is indescribable gratitude in the face of God's perpetual and preemptive love, a love which is not contingent upon requital or even belief in His existence. ”

We know there are poets who are chosen: by what or whom, we no more know than what lies beyond our final breath, or what caused a certain action which resulted in the fulfillment or the desecration and collapse of what we most cared for in life. ”

I write and have done so primarily for personal pleasure. ”

Poetry endures when it possesses passionate and primally sincere clarity in the service of articulating universal human concerns. ”