Paul Engle Quotes
Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.
A barn with cattle and horses is the place to begin Christmas; after all, that's where the original event happened, and that same smell was the first air that the Christ Child breathed.
The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mother's hand making sure I was settled in bed.
Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poet's abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.
Other families bought automobiles; we had a horse-headed hitching post in front of our house and drove horses.
I grew up in the prolonged survival of the great age of the horse, with harness and saddle and sleigh bells and horse pictures, not as antiques but the facts of our lives.
Writing is like this -- you dredge for the poem's meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth.
You come to know the aches and vanities and tastes and intrigues of an entire neighborhood at a drug store.
To eat in the same room where food is cooked - that is the way to thank the Lord for His abundance.
I had been warned about Jews by my gentile friends - they did terrible things with knives to boys.
When your first marriage goes into tragedy, you become very battle-scarred... I even thought of suicide. Luckily, I had known some happy marriages.
All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the un-visionary language of farm, city, and love.
