Brenda Hillman Quotes

I have many influences and poets whose work I love. My personal canon includes Blake, Keats, Dickinson, Baudelaire, Stevens, Duncan and Barbara Guest - and many living poets as well.

- Brenda Hillman

I wrote something when I was 9 that seemed pretty good for a 9 year old; it concerned flowers in our family garden - I was grateful my mother praised it. Of course, I found out later it was pretty silly, but it was the first poem I was proud of.

- Brenda Hillman

The techniques of contemporary poetry are probably the techniques of your daily life. I don't know a single person who goes into the grocery store and thinks in complete sentences. We often think in fragments, we think in little lists, we think in non-sequiturs, we think in feelings that may not match up with each other.

- Brenda Hillman

The kinds of things that poetry can offer are timeless - mainly the kind of compression it offers of powerful language, powerful feelings and images, and, you know, the inner experience becoming outer.

- Brenda Hillman

I'm always trying to figure out what God is and why matter exists and whether it contains spirit or not.

- Brenda Hillman

You go to a poem to get the mystery - and sometimes you go to get more confused.

- Brenda Hillman