Thomas Lynch

“If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.”

“Poems seem to have a life of their own. They tell you when enough is enough.”

“The girl who climbed up the water tower. We would have counted her an accident until the medical examiner found breaks and fractures from her hips to her heels. "You fall head first," he said. "Feet first's a jump.”

“Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death - the things that make us and undo us, create and destroy, how we breed and disappear and the emotional context that surrounds these events.”

“But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.”

“Usually a poem takes shape accoustically - a line or a pair of lines will repeat itself in my ear.”

“Once she even successfully argued on behalf of my older brother, Dan, getting a BBGun, a weapon which he promptly turned against his younger siblings, outfitting us in helmet and leather jacket and instructing us to run across Eaton Park while he practiced his marksmanship. Today he is a colonel in the army and the rest of us are gun-shy.”

“I'm more interested in the meaning of funerals and the mourning that people do. It's not a retail experience. It's an existential one.”

“I'm lazy but generally task oriented so having a hoop to jump through means eventually I'll make the effort.”

“I had this theory. It was based loosely on the unremarkable observation that the old are always looking back with longing while the young, with the same longing, look ahead. One man remembers what the other imagines.”

“So I suppose poetry, language, the shaping of it, was and remains for me an effort to make sense out of essentially senseless situations.”