Quotes by American Authors - Page 3126

When a group of people get up from a table, the table doesn’tknow which way any of them will go.
Galway Kinnell
A poem should not meanBut be.
Archibald MacLeish
I loved a woman whose beauty Like the moon moved all the humming heavens to music till the stars with their tiny teeth burst into song and I fell on the ground before her while the sky hardened and she laughed and turned me down softly, I was so young.
Peter Meinke
And then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the saddest smile I ever saw.
Charles Bukowski
And all at once the heavy nightFell from my eyes and I could see, --A drenched and dripping apple-tree,A last long line of silver rain,A sky grown clear and blue again.And as I looked a quickening gustOf wind blew up to me and thrustInto my face a miracleOf orchard-breath, and with the smell, --I know not how such things can be! --I breathed my soul back into me.Ah! Up then from the ground sprang IAnd hailed the earth with such a cryAs is not heard save from a manWho has been dead, and lives again.About the trees my arms I wound;Like one gone mad I hugged the ground;I raised my quivering arms on high;I laughed and laughed into the sky
Edna St. Vincent Millay
it's so easy to be a poetand so hard to be a man.
Charles Bukowski
I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.
Richard M. Rorty
One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
Jane Hirshfield
And the Hippos were boiled in their tanks!
Jack Kerouac
When a woman's face is wrinkledAnd her hairs are sprinkled, With gray, Lackaday!Aside she's cast, No one respect will pay;Remember, Lasses, remember.And while the sun shines make hay:You must not expect in December, The flowers you gathered in May.
Ann Rinaldi
literature will lose, sunlight will win, don't worry.
Franz Wright
This is newness: every little tawdryObstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only youDon't know what to make of the sudden slippiness,The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant.There's no getting up it by the words you know.No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe.We have only come to look. You are too newTo want the world in a glass hat.
Sylvia Plath
From the union of power and money,from the union of power and secrecy,from the union of government and science,from the union of government and art,from the union of science and money,from the union of ambition and ignorance,from the union of genius and war,from the union of outer space and inner vacuity,the Mad Farmer walks quietly away.
Wendell Berry
I can’t help but notice that you keep writing love poetry to my wife. Well, you see, I married her, which makes her my wife. You know what you might want to try? Writing some poems about the sunset. The sunset isn’t fucking married.
A.J. Jacobs
Come to the beach with meAnd watch the pelicans die,Hear their feeble screamsCalling to an empty skyWhere once they playedAnd scouted for food,Not scavenging like the gullsBut plummeting unafraidInto friendly waters.Come to the beach with meAnd watch the pelicans die,Listen to their feeble screamsCalling to an empty sky.Maybe Christ will walk byAnd save them in their final toilOr work a miracle from the shore,A courtesy of Union Oil.Come to the beach with meAnd watch the pelicans die.My God! They'll never fly again.It's worse than Normandy somehow,For there we only murdered men.
James Kavanaugh
Oh, friend, forget not, when you fain would noteIn me a beauty that was never mine,How first you knew me in a book I wrote,How first you loved me for a written line....
Edna St. Vincent Millay
The Poem That Took The Place Of A MountainThere it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table. It reminded him how he had needed A place to go to in his own direction How he had recomposed the pines, Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds For the outlook that would be right, Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion: The exact rock where his inexactness Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged Where he could lie and gazing down at the sea, Recognize his unique and solitary home.
Wallace Stevens
Pleasured equallyIn seeking as in finding,Each detail minding,Old Walt went seekingAnd finding.
Langston Hughes
For all the ghosts and corpses that shall never know the breath of our childrenso longfor the sacrifice and endurance of our mothers and the sustained breath of our fatherswe live
Saul Williams
In the boundaryless forests, there’re dancers of nude.Yet in the confines of pasture, there’s promise of food.On which is your side?Ô, but tarry and bide,ere you decide,in both do confide.
Roman Payne
You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.
David Markson
Shall I compare thee to a barrel of apples?Though art more hairy, but sweeter inside.Rough winds couldn't keep me from taking you to chapel,Where finally a horse could take a bride...
Cynthia Hand
Little world, full of scars and gashes, ripened with another's pain,Your flowers feed on carrion--so do your birds;Men feed on each other because you taught them life was cheap,Flowing from your endless womb without pain or understanding.No midwife caresses your flesh or bathes clean your progeny,Life spurts from you, little world,and you regard it with disdain.Only bruised men sense your cruelty, men whose life has lost its meaning.
James Kavanaugh
I played God todayAnd it was fun!I made animals that men had never seenSo they would stop and scratch their headsInstead of scowling.I made words that men had never heardSo they would stop and stare at meInstead of running.And I made love that laughedSo men would giggle like childrenInstead of sighing.Tomorrow, perhaps, I won't be GodAnd you will know itBecause you won't see any three-headed catsOr bushes with bells on...I wish I could always play GodSo that lonely men could laugh!
James Kavanaugh
One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.
Charles Simic
Two girls discover the secret of lifein a sudden line of poetry.
Denise Levertov
Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.
Kim Addonizio
Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.
T.S Eliot
We walked through night until there was a poem.
Brenda Hillman
In scientific thinking are always present elements of poetry. Science and music requires a thought homogeneous.
Albert Einstein
A voice that had traversed the centuries, so heavy it broke what it touched, so heavy I feared it would ring in me with eternal resonance, a voice rusty with the sound of curses and the hoarse cries that issue from the delta in the last paroxysm of orgasm.
Anaïs Nin
Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
W.S. Merwin
With you a part of me hath passed away; For in the peopled forest of my mind A tree made leafless by this wintry wind Shall never don again its green array. Chapel and fireside, country road and bay, Have something of their friendliness resigned; Another, if I would, I could not find, And I am grown much older in a day. But yet I treasure in my memory Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease, And the dear honour of your amity; For these once mine, my life is rich with these. And I scarce know which part may greater be,-- What I keep of you, or you rob from me.
George Santayana
Well in case you failed to notice,In case you failed to see,This is my heart bleeding before you,This is me down on my kneesThese foolish games are tearing me apartYour thoughtless words are breaking my heartYou're breaking my heart
Jewel
Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64)
Robert Frost
If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
Walker Percy
For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
Adrienne Rich
These wrinkles are nothingThese gray hairs are nothing,This stomach which sagswith old food, these bruisedand swollen ankles, my darkening brain,they are nothing.I am the same boymy mother used to kiss.
Mark Strand
In the great green room, there was a telephoneAnd a red balloonAnd a picture of a cat jumping over the moon...
Margaret Wise Brown
Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.Let me keep company always with those who say "Look!" and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.
Mary Oliver
My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.The vein in my neckadores you. A swordstands up between my hips,my hidden fleece sends forth its scent of human oil.
Li-Young Lee
Poem (the spirit likes to dress up) The spirit likes to dress up like this: ten fingers, ten toes,shoulders, and all the rest at night in the black branches, in the morningin the blue branches of the world. It could float, of course, but would ratherplumb rough matter. Airy and shapeless thing, it needs the metaphor of the body,lime and appetite, the oceanic fluids; it needs the body’s world, instinctand imagination and the dark hug of time, sweetness and tangibility,to be understood, to be more than pure light that burns where no one is –so it enters us – in the morning shines from brute comfort like a stitch of lightning;and at night lights up the deep and wondrous drownings of the body like a star.
Mary Oliver
Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.
Jack Spicer
Poetry seems especially like nothing else so much as itself. Poetry is not like, it is the very lining of the inner life.
C.D. Wright
The following year the house was substantially remodeled, and the conservatory removed. As the walls of the now crumbling wall were being torn down, one of the workmen chanced upon a small leatherbound book that had apparently been concealed behind a loose brick or in a crevice in the wall. By this time Emily Dickinson was a household name in Amherst. It happened that this carpenter was a lover of poetry- and hers in particular- and when he opened the little book and realized that that he had found her diary, he was “seized with a violent trembling,” as he later told his grandson. Both electrified and terrified by the discovery, he hid the book in his lunch bucket until the workday ended and then took it home. He told himself that after he had read and savored every page, he would turn the diary over to someone who would know how to best share it with the public. But as he read, he fell more and more deeply under the poet’s spell and began to imagine that he was her confidant. He convinced himself that in his new role he was no longer obliged to give up the diary. Finally, having brushed away the light taps of conscience, he hid the book at the back of an oak chest in his bedroom, from which he would draw it out periodically over the course of the next sixty-four years until he had virtually memorized its contents. Even his family never knew of its existence. Shortly before his death in 1980 at the age of eighty-nine, the old man finally showed his most prized possession to his grandson (his only son having preceded him in death), confessing that his delight in it had always been tempered by a nagging guilt and asking that the young man now attempt to atone for his grandfather’s sin. The grandson, however, having inherited both the old man’s passion for poetry and his tendency towards paralysis of conscience, and he readily succumbed to the temptation to hold onto the diary indefinitely while trying to decide what ought to be done with it.
Jamie Fuller
from what we cannot hold the stars are made
W.S. Merwin
A JEWELRY STORE NAMED INDIAIf you hold this Dazzling emeraldUp to the sky,It will shine a billion Beautiful miraclesPainted from the tearsOf the Most High.Plucked from the lush gardensOf a yellowish-green paradise,Look inside this hypnotic gemAnd a kaleidoscope of Titillating, Soul-raising Sights and colorsWill tease and seduceYour eyes and mind.Tell me, sir.Have you ever heardA peacock sing?Hold your earTo this mystical stoneAnd you will hearSacred hymns flowingTo the vibrationsOf the perfumedWind.
Suzy Kassem
and if iif i ever let love gobecause the hatred and the whisperingsbecome a phantom dictate i o-bey in lieu of impulse and realities(the blossoming flamingos of mywild mimosa trees)then let love freeze meout.(from i must become a menace to my enemies)
June Jordan
See it was like this when we waltz into this place.A couple of papish cats is doing an Aztec two-stepAnd I says Dad let's cutbut then this dame comes up behind me see and says you and me could really existWow I says Only the next day she has bad teeth and really hates poetry.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Say to them,say to the down-keepers,the sun-slappers,the self-soilers,the harmony-hushers,"Even if you are not ready for dayit cannot always be night."You will be right.For that is the hard home-run.Live not for battles won.Live not for the-end-of-the-song.Live in the along.
Gwendolyn Brooks
You are only as free as you think you are and freedom will always be as real as you believe it to be.
Robert M. Drake
Don’t write with a pen. Ink tends to give the impression the words shouldn’t be changed.Write with what gives you the most sensual satisfaction.Write in a hard-covered notebook with green lined pages. Green is easy on the eyes. Blank white pages seems to challenge you to create the world before you start writing. It may be true that you, the modern poet, must make the world as you go, but why be reminded of it before you even have one word on the page?Don’t erase. Cross out rapidly and violently, never with slow consideration if you can help it.Start, as some smarty once said, in the middle of things.Play with syntax.Never want to say anything so strongly that you have to give up the option of finding something better – if you have to say it, you will.Read your poem aloud many times. If you don’t enjoy it every time, something may be wrong.If you ask a question, don’t answer it, or answer a question not asked, or defer. (If you can answer the question, to ask it is to waste time).Maximum sentence length: seventeen words.Minimum: One.Don’t be afraid to take emotional possession of words. If you don’t love a few words enough to own them, you will have to be very clever to write a good poem.
Richard Hugo
But let us laugh carelessly like other men. Let us be timid even among fools. Let us knot silence around our throats.For they would surely kill us.
Glenway Wescott
I've written some poetry I don't understand myself
Carl Sandburg
My Personalityunfolding before youlike a Swiss Army knife.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
What's madness but nobility of soulAt odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!I know the purity of pure despair,My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,That place among the rocks--is it a cave,Or winding path? The edge is what I have............... Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,Keeps buzzing at the sill.~From "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke
You must be careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin.
Stanley Kunitz
I couldn't tell fact from fiction,Or if the dream was trueMy only sure predictionIn this world was you.I'd touch your features inchly. Beard love and dared the cost, The sented spiel reeled me unreal And I found my senses lost.
Maya Angelou
A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.
Robert Frost
I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet -- buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture -- than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.
Mary Karr