From Vera Pavlova's "Heaven Is Not Verbose: A Notebook"

Poetry should be written the way adultery is committed: on the run, on the sly, during the time not accounted for. And then you come home, as if nothing ever happened.

Pick a piece of wood floating down the river and follow it down the current with your glance, keeping the eyes constantly on it, without getting ahead of the current. This is the way poetry should be read: at the pace of a line.

To write in spite of everything, even when generally speaking there is nothing to spite.

"The ovaries of a newborn girl contain up to 400,000 egg cells." All my poems are already in me.

From a letter of a young poet: "I write when I feel bad. When I feel fine, I don't write." With me, it's the opposite: when I write, I feel fine. I feel bad when I do not write.

I write about what I love. I love writing even more than what I write about. And what do I do it for? To love myself, if only for a brief while.

An ideal poem: every line of it can serve as a title for a book.

"In his books, and only in his books, a writer can do anything he pleases, provided he has talent. In real life, however, a writer cannot be overly lax, so as not to let people guess that in his books he tells the truth about himself." (L. Shestov)

--current issue of Poetry magazine