off to work we go

David Ignatow was a salesman and finally president of his father’s book bindery. (Ever a realist, Ignatow wrote in his Notebooks, “Being a poet is to know you do not exist by poetry.”)

Quoted in Robert Philip’s “Poets’ Work, Poets’ Jobs,” The Associated Writing Programs’ Chronicle (December, 1997)

commonplace

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

—Jean Cocteau