24+ Shane McCrae Quotes On Education, Religion And Friendship

Quick Jump To
  • Top 10 Shane McCrae Quotes
  • Life Lessons
  • Famous Shane McCrae Quotes

Top 10 Shane McCrae Quotes

  1. I hope I can write toward my interests. But poets should be afraid of too fluidly responding to what they're interested in.
  2. I had/have a habit of sending books out before they're ready. And then I edit with almost absurd intensity. But I've done about a book a year.
  3. I think about the body kind of all the time, being as how I'm really uncomfortable in mine.
  4. I think I cause a lot of headaches for editors - it's impossible to keep up with the ridiculous amount of changes I make.
  5. I like having a phrase lying around to get poems started. It's like having a key.
  6. I wanted to be a composer for a while, and for a while, and maybe still, I found writing music much easier than writing poetry. So maybe my brain clings to it.
  7. I just can't write and listen to music at the same time.
  8. I don't know that I find either aspect of Jesus more interesting than the other, although maybe I think about the God one more.
  9. I actually can't listen to music and write poetry at the same time, but I do kind of think about the music I've been listening to when I write.
  10. There's no such thing as an animal too big too kill, AND we're cornered by such animals every day.

Shane McCrae Famous Quotes And Sayings

A white noise app wouldn't work for me - I would be too distracted by the non-white noise noises I could still hear, even more distracted than i would otherwise be. So I have to just accept the regular noises. — Shane McCrae

I do try to incorporate particular rhythmic and generally sonic motifs I discover in music as such, and if one thinks of language in a narrow sense, that, perhaps, suggests a possibility for a rhythmic sensibility that enters poetry from outside of language. — Shane McCrae

I believe rhythmic sensibility is always a product and extension of language, defined broadly, among other things. But it is an immediate product and extension - no time elapses between the exposure to language and the creation of rhythmic sensibility. — Shane McCrae

I do believe in Jesus as wholly God and wholly human, and I believe the human part was human. — Shane McCrae

I think that the casual reader and the lyric and confession are trickily tied up together. I mean often when I read my students' poems my first impulse is to say, "O, the subject of this pronoun, this 'I,' is whatever kid wrote this poem." The audience for lyric poems is "confessionalized" to some extent. And I think this audience tends to find long narrative poems, for instance, kind of bewildering. — Shane McCrae

If I can quote myself, I explained whatever it is I'm doing once for No Tell Motel, and I still think it's the clearest I've ever been about this: "I don't write free verse poems - mostly because I can't. But I am interested in the musical effects achievable with free verse." — Shane McCrae

I love to read long books. I enjoy experiencing that extension. But it's not something I feel comfortable with and not something I think I can gain comfort with by practice. It was a real struggle for me while writing memoir to get past three pages or so. In poems, I can write long poems. But length in prose: no. — Shane McCrae

People get anxious about dividing sorts of poetry, say Confessionalism from political poetry. But Confessionalism is very much an expression of racial privilege and of class privilege. I don't think it's always a blind expression of these privileges but it does have its genesis in them, in the politics of them. — Shane McCrae

That's a fairly Wordsworthian way to look at things! But yeah, actually - part of the poet's work, I think, is to maintain or reintroduce the imaginative capacity of their earlier self while nonetheless maturing. And I do think the more successful the poet is at this particular thing, the greater their achievement as a poet. — Shane McCrae

Confessionalism relates to writers of color. I think confessional poetry is in its way very Catholic, capital C. One of the formative ideas of Confessionalism, beyond psychoanalysis, is a very actual fall from grace. And, at least in America, people of color never occupy that position of grace the way that white people do. So I think that in some very actual ways the confessional mode, strictly speaking, is not possible for non-white writers. — Shane McCrae

I was just thinking about how my grandparents, who raised me, would be considered "white trash," whatever that means - mostly for being racists, I'd say. And how, as a child, I wanted to be like them, and identified with them culturally. — Shane McCrae

I'm always glad that other people are way smarter about my poems than I am. — Shane McCrae

I learned to write with my desk in the living room, next to the TV. But mostly in my head, and I try to be able to do it under any circumstances. — Shane McCrae

I think that the moment we're living in offers the best opportunity we've had in a long time in that a lot of things having to do with identity politics are being talked about in poems. The only problem there is that a lot of the time these are being talked about in confessional modes. — Shane McCrae

Life Lessons by Shane McCrae

  1. Shane McCrae's work emphasizes the importance of self-reflection and self-knowledge as a means of understanding and navigating the complexities of life.
  2. His lyrics often explore themes of identity, mental health, and the power of storytelling as tools for healing and growth.
  3. Through his work, McCrae encourages listeners to recognize their own potential and to strive for a better understanding of themselves and the world around them.
Citation

Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes by Shane McCrae. For popular citation styles (APA, Chicago, MLA), go to citation page.

Embed HTML Link

Copy and paste this HTML code in your webpage