Martha Ronk Quotes

• I can't remember the past, or I can't see very clearly, or I've gotten older and the person I was isn't there anymore, and the place I grew up isn't where I live now.

  Martha Ronk

  Past, Remember, Grew Up

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  6 Copy quote

• A number of poems don't work alone. They need to fit together to work.

  Martha Ronk

  Numbers, Together, Needs

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• I prefer always to think that I am creating a book, not a series of stand-alone poems.

  Martha Ronk

  Book, Thinking, Creating

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• The days start to be charged not because tomorrow you're leaving, but because in three weeks you're leaving. The future impinges. So you start to think about the frame.

  Martha Ronk

  Thinking, Leaving, Three

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• You can get a sense of the wonderful power of framing by holding your fingers up in a kind of square, walking around the room and framing it differently - how that changes the nature of what you think the room is like.

  Martha Ronk

  Thinking, Squares, Rooms

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• Looking out a window from different vantage points changes what you see and therefore what you write.

  Martha Ronk

  Writing, Different, Vantage Point

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  6 Copy quote

• I'm in California, so I know people who are natives who tell me there's lots of weather here, but it's not the same as being in Vermont. Since I grew up on the East Coast I miss that weather all the time. You'd think I'd get used to not having it, but I don't.

  Martha Ronk

  Thinking, Weather, California

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• Often poets fall into groups that exclude others, and don't pay attention to those who write in different ways. It seems so limited to me.

  Martha Ronk

  Fall, Writing, Groups

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• I want literature to open all the doors that I can't open by myself, and to allow me to see things that I wouldn't otherwise see.

  Martha Ronk

  Doors, Literature, Want

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• I try to attach myself to things around me so that they don't slip away.

  Martha Ronk

  Trying, Slips

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• I think those of us who use language are always trying for this, trying to keep everything from floating away by trying to write about it despite failure.

  Martha Ronk

  Writing, Thinking, Always Trying

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• One of the things I've always thought is that if I were to write a poetics, it would have to do with the poetics of failure, and the way in which all the things that you claim or that you try for are already based on the limits of language.

  Martha Ronk

  Writing, Trying, Way

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• Language is as fragile as the little alpine plant.

  Martha Ronk

  Littles, Language, Plant

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• I can't move my body slowly. I can't move the line slowly. So I end up with way too much, often opaque to me later.

  Martha Ronk

  Moving, Body, Opaque

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• I spend a lot of time revising. I'm not somebody who can move slowly.

  Martha Ronk

  Moving, Revising

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• I know that in some ways I operate from a kind of antiquated interest in imagery, while many contemporary poets are not so interested in imagery. I think part of it is my training, and just my visual sense of things.

  Martha Ronk

  Thinking, Training, Way

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• I'm really interested in what you remember, how you remember, what your perspective is as opposed to somebody else's.

  Martha Ronk

  Perspective, Remember

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• Even your own memory changes over time because of circumstances or even because your body changes.

  Martha Ronk

  Memories, Body, Circumstances

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• Our mind is dark in some way, and so we use rhetoric as a kind of prop or foil.

  Martha Ronk

  Dark, Mind, Use

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  7 Copy quote

• Everyone had always told me I had to see alpine flowers, since I was writing about flowers, and I had never seen these. So I happened to be teaching a class at the University of Colorado, and I got to go for hikes that took me there. But my perspective was most often down at ground level, trying to see quite tiny exquisite flowers.

  Martha Ronk

  Flower, Teaching, Writing

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• Gardens do offer a temporal tableau and certainly mean differently in different eras and indeed geographies (think of the formal gardens in France).

  Martha Ronk

  Mean, Garden, Thinking

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• I've always been interested in the fragility of things, and with special urgency now because of climate change, but also because of the accidents of reading.

  Martha Ronk

  Reading, Special, Climate

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• If it's a drop of dew, it will dissolve.

  Martha Ronk

  Dew, Ifs

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• Shakespeare, of course, makes us ever aware of transience, not only in the sonnets, but also powerfully in his plays - spectacles for a brief period of time and then gone, as when Prospero describes the pageant fading, leaving "not a rack behind."

  Martha Ronk

  Play, Leaving, Gone

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

• I'm always somehow drawn to that sense of how fragile things are and how a garden means so differently depending upon whose language you happen to be in or whose century you happen to be in.

  Martha Ronk

  Mean, Garden, Language

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

  4 Copy quote

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