"In being one in being that one she was one."

Dugan, Levis, Martin, Lux, Kaufman, Hunt, Stein

Alan Dugan:

Larry Levis:

The moment of writing is not an escape…it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such an ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it.

Carl Martin:

Thomas Lux:

This is not something one chooses to do….It is something I was drawn to. I do it because I love to do it, and because I don’t have any choice. If I don’t write, I feel empty and lost. Poetry exists because there is no other way to say the things that get said in good poems except in poems. There is something about the right combination of metaphor or image connected to the business of being alive that only poems can do.

Bob Kaufman:

Erica Hunt:

I always say “we rehearse things in writing,” we rehearse thoughts that we would not quite say in the same way. Writing is an imaginal space that allows us to try out and risk and flex a kind of muscle, intellectually, that we would not do in the course of ordinary experience, that’s what the art space does. These elders show us that they are the complex figures that we can emulate in our own time, in our own means.  Sometimes—often—there’s trauma. The articulation of those traumas—I am thinking about intergenerational differences—when I was coming up, we didn’t talk about our traumas this way, and in fact from my mother’s generation, that wasn’t even a whisper of how they dealt with, or experience they may have had that was traumatic or that may have been assaultive. So that intergenerational dialogue is crucial because each of us, in some ways, is taking it further than the next, we hope.

Gertrude Stein:

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