Jan Zwicky Quotes

Love, I'm pretty sure, is light.

Art is not merely a decorative enhancement of our lives, but a sign of our desire to live in the world fully and honestly.

Even the rain in its night singing, / the night rain in its forgetting, / is a kind of light.

One of the reasons I think we are sometimes critical of support for the arts is that art — lyric art in particular — can make us uncomfortably aware that economically expedient answers may not always be true.

My heartfelt appreciation goes out to Jan Zwicky, Don McKay, John Barton, Barry Dempster, Carolyn Forché and Elizabeth Philips for their masterful eyes and minds.

that's what I wanted: words made of that: language / that could bend light.

Where will my soul go when it can't walk among them? When the earth I have loved turns its back and closes its eyes. I will lie down, then, in the wreckage of meaning. In the rot of the forest, the rot of the wind. I will lie down in the shouting and silence, the dust of you filling my mouth.

Because she was a woman she'd been raped. Because she was a woman there was no excuse. Because she was a woman they dragged her to the pit. You can hear the dull snap as the bone breaks under flesh.

But critique, too, is empty unless the space it clears becomes home to insight.

To understand a metaphor is to recognize that if one context or conceptual constellation is laid over another, just so, aspects or outlines will spring into focus, a common pattern will be discernible — one that makes a difference to our grasp of the individual constellations or contexts separately.

Language, too, is a natural phenomenon.

In illness, we grasp how the self approaches the condition of language.