Poetry Quotes

She reads his poems gratefully in her small Mississippi town. It's an undramatic life, yet these past months she seems to have found the intensity he yearns for, This also sounds like bragging, though she doesn't mean it to. If she could, she'd let him bear her secret. She'd let all great men bear it, for s few hours. Then, when she too it back, they'd remember how it feels to be inhabited.

~ Beth Ann Fennelly

I recall that now and I recall everything for what do we have but the past to parent us?

~ Kathleen Driskell

With heaven in our hearts,life is romancing uswith glimpses ofthe universe dancing.

~ Ann Louise Ramsey

Logic, when applied to people, fails miserably!

~ Joseph J. Breunig 3Rd

Jen's Mum Will WriteJen's mum writes advertising copy.She specializes in white goods:washing machines, dryers, fridges,freezers, dishwashers.She hates these applianceshulkingin corners,power-hungry and fractious.One day, she will have a wood stove,and she'll write about things that matter-she will write about birth and death,about love and the absence of love,about fathers and children,about mothers and daughters,about lovers and friends.She'll write about the whole goddamnwonderful, awful businessof loving and being loved

~ Margaret Wild

Écoutez le monde blanchorriblement las de son effort immenseses articulations rebelles craquer sous les étoiles duresses raideurs d'acier bleu transperçant la chair mystiqueécoute ses victoires proditoires trompeter ses défaitesécoute aux alibis grandioses son piètre trébuchementPitié pour nos vainquers omniscients et naïfs !

~ Aimé Césaire

By giving words the latitude she does, (Marianne) Van Hirtum emphasizes their contagious qualities: they become almost like viruses, with which it is necessary to put oneself in harmony by sympathetic magic if one is not to be overwhelmed. ... What is essential is to become one with the sickness, that is, in the context of language as a whole, to enter into contact with words.

~ Michael Richardson

Wer ein Theater füllen will, bedient sich der Dramaturgie. Um es zu leeren genügt Ideologie.

~ Oliver Hassencamp

When a poet settled down to write a poem, could he foresee the lines he would write? Did his head constantly spin with riddles and rhymes and was his only job to put them down? What if he couldn’t get them to make sense, and no one, not even the person he cared for most, could have pleasure in reading it? What would he do?

~ Alysha Speer

that stone Buddha deserves all the birdshit it getsI wave my skinny arms like a tall flower in the wind

~ Ikkyu

I'd love to give you somethingbut what would help?

~ Ikkyu

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy!The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and handand asshole holy!Everything is holy! everybody's holy! everywhere isholy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman's anangel!

~ Allen Ginsberg

Hearing a crow with no mouthCry in the deepDarkness of the night,I feel a longing forMy father before he was born.

~ Ikkyu

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

~ E.b. White

And I think that it is certainly possible that the objective universe can be affected by the poet. I mean, you recall Orpheus made the trees and the stones dance and so forth, and this is something which is in almost all primitive cultures. I think it has some definite basis to it. I'm not sure what. It's like telekinesis, which I know very well on a pinball machine is perfectly possible.

~ Jack Spicer

LIFE IS SUBVERSIVE

~ Ernesto Cardenal

... You can't be with God and be neutral. / True contemplation is resistance. And poetry, / gazing at clouds is resistance I found out in jail.

~ Ernesto Cardenal

You bend the nailBut keep hammering becauseHammering makes the world

~ Dean Young

Wild creatures' eyes, the colonel said,Are innocent and fathomlessAnd when I look at them I seeThat they are not aware of meAnd oh I find and oh I blessA comfort in this emptinessThey only see me when they wantTo pounce upon me at the hunt;But in the tame varietyThere couches an anxietyAs if they yearned, yet knew not whatThey yearned for, nor they yearned for not.And so my dog would look at meAnd it was pitiful to seeSuch love and such dependency.The human heart is not at easeWith animals that look like these.

~ Stevie Smith

I am five, I will never understandwhy we are stranded in our selvesbut in this moment I knowmy own storyis understanding our singlenessthat I am destined to move my body and timeinto the body-timethe storyof Others.

~ Sharon Doubiago

Ted: A fucking good poem is a weapon. It's-- and not like a--a popgun or something.- It's a bomb.It's like a bloody big bomb. Sylvia: That’s why they make childrenlearn them in school.They don't want them messing aboutwith them on their own. I mean, just imagineif a sonnet went off accidentally. Boom.

~ John Brownlow

the next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern.

~ Annie Finch

A Rough GuideBe polite at the reception desk.Not all the knives are in the museum.The waitresses know that a nice boyis formed in the same way as a deckchair.Pay for the beer and send flowers.Introduce yourself as Richard.Do not refer to what somebody didat a particular time in the past.Remember, every Friday we used to gofor a walk. I walked. You walked.Everything in the past is irregular.This steak is very good. Sit down.There is no wine, but there is ice cream.Eat slowly. I have many matches.

~ Mark Haddon

It is not growing like a treeIn bulk, doth make Man better be;Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:A lily of a dayIs fairer far in MayAlthough it fall and die that night;It was the plant and flower of Light.In small proportions we just beauties see;And in short measures life may perfect be (Ben Jonson)

~ Aidan Chambers

Poetry is a way of coming to know the realness of things, fiction is a way of coming to know the world of relationships, nonfiction is a way of coming to know the world of the mind.

~ Kelly Cherry

. . .criticism is to poetry as air is to a noise: it allows it to be heard; and even if we can't see it or feel it, it is there, shaping how we hear.

~ Annie Finch

Tho' you're tired and weary, still journey on, Till you come to your happy abode,Where all the love you've been dreaming of,Will be there at the end of the road.

~ Harry Lauder

. . . poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value.

~ Major Jackson

Know that there is often hidden in us a dormant poet, always young and alive.

~ Paul De Musset

And round about there is a rabbleOf the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.They shall inherit the earth.

~ Ezra Pound

Evil is not good's absence but gravity'severlasting bedrock and its fatal chainsinert, violent, the suffrage of our days.

~ Geoffrey Hill

Yo, múltiple, como en contradicción

~ Julia De Burgos

Streets paved with opal sadness,Lead me counterclockwise, to pockets of joy,And jazz.

~ Bob Kaufman

The Plot Against The GiantFirst GirlWhen this yokel comes maundering,Whetting his hacker,I shall run before him,Diffusing the civilest odorsOut of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.It will check him.Second GirlI shall run before him,Arching cloths besprinkled with colorsAs small as fish-eggs.The threadsWill abash him.Third GirlOh, la...le pauvre!I shall run before him,With a curious puffing.He will bend his ear then.I shall whisperHeavenly labials in a world of gutturals.It will undo him.

~ Wallace Stevens

... Up telephone poles, Which rear, half out of leavageAs though they would shriekLike things smothered by their ownGreen, mindless, unkillable ghosts.In Georgia, the legend saysThat you must close your windowsAt night to keep it out of the houseThe glass is tinged with green, even so,As the tendrils crawl over the fields.The night the Kudzu hasYour pasture, you sleep like the dead.Silence has grown orientalAnd you cannot step upon the ground...ALL: Kudzu by James Dickey

~ James Dickey

Lovers meander in prose and rhyme,trying to say-for the thousandth time-what's easier done than said.

~ Piet Hein

The artistic reward for refuting the received national tradition is liberation. The price is homelessness. Interior exile.

~ C.d. Wright

The books [poetry collections] may not sell, but neither are they given away or thrown away. They tend, more than other books, to fall apart in their owners’ hands. Not I suppose good news in a culture and economy built on obsolescence. But for a book to be loved this way and turned to this way for consolation and intense renewable excitement seems to me a marvel.

~ Louise Glück

I never have time to write anymore. And when I do I only write about how I never have time. It's work and it's money and I've written more lists than songs lately. I stay up all night to do all these things I need to do, be all these things I want to be, playing with shadows in the darkness that shouldn't be able to exist. Empty bottles and cigarettes while watching the sunrise, why do I complain? I have it all, everything I ever asked for.

~ Charlotte Eriksson

You bear a sword and shield, remind meof her labor, her stoning gaze. What beastwill your blade free next? What call will you loosefrom another woman's throat?

~ Donika Kelly