Quotes by Poets - Page 424

Evil is not good's absence but gravity'severlasting bedrock and its fatal chainsinert, violent, the suffrage of our days.
Geoffrey Hill
... 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
Yo, múltiple, como en contradicción
Julia de Burgos
. . . poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value.
Major Jackson
Lovers meander in prose and rhyme,trying to say-for the thousandth time-what's easier done than said.
Piet Hein
The journey back is always longer than the forward run.
Rod McKuen
We left you there, lonely,Beauty your power,Wisdom your watchman,To hold the clay tower.from 'The Tale of the Tiger Tree
Vachel Lindsay
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
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
. . .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
I give you the end of a golden string,Only wind it into a ball,It will lead you in at Heaven's gateBuilt in Jerusalem's wall.
William Blake
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
You bend the nailBut keep hammering becauseHammering makes the world
Dean Young
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
L'artGreen arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth, Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.
Ezra Pound
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
Hearing a crow with no mouthCry in the deepDarkness of the night,I feel a longing forMy father before he was born.
Ikkyu
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
I was the solitary plovera pencil for a wing-boneFrom the secret notesI must tiltupon the pressureexecute and adjust In us sea-air rhythm"We live by the urgent waveof the verse
Lorine Niedecker
noone knows and noone seeswe lovers doing what we pleasebut people stop and point at theseten milk bottles a-turning into cheese
Roger McGough
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
NexusI wrote stubbornly into the evening.At the window, a giant praying mantisrubbed his monkey wrench head against the glass,begging vacantly with pale eyes;and the commas leapt at me like wormsor miniature scythes blackened with age.the praying mantis screeched louder,his ragged jaws opening into formlessness.I walked outside;the grass hissed at my heels.Up ahead in the lapping darknesshe wobbled, magnified and absurdly green,a brontosaurus, a poet.
Rita Dove
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
The heart under your heart is not the one you shareso readily so full of pleasantry & tendernessit is a single blackberry at the heart of a brambleor else some larger fruit heavy the size of a fist
Craig Arnold
Some wrong eternity that wouldn’t budge, like trying to move a wardrobe or a safe, only to feel how light I was.
Deborah Digges
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fallFrightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
...It's not that the worm forgives the plough; it gives it no mind. (Pain occurs, in passing.) (lines 37-39 in the poem 'Fantasia on a Theme from IKEA')
Philip Gross
I like the imp / in impossibility
Pierre Joris
Must be going crazy---my favorite poet latelyhas been me!
Wayne Kaumualii Westlake
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
William Stafford
. . . On a sandbarsunlight stretches out its limbs, or is ita sycamore, so brazen, so clean and bold?
William Stafford
Hak cihâna tolıdur kimseler Hakk’ı bilmez / Anı sen senden iste o senden ayru olmaz.
Yunus Emre
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
The sea is dangerous, they say, but not if you're the sea.
Sarah Maclay
Every evening words, not stars, light the sky. No rest in life like life itself.
Umberto Saba
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
...always-the sharp,plaintive edgeon the rimof the spoonof my giving.(lines 8-13 of the poem 'Confessions')
Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno
Two such as you with such a master speedCannot be parted nor be swept awayFrom one another once you are agreedThat life is only life forevermoreTogether wing to wing and oar to oar
Robert Frost
The worm doth woo the mortal, death claims a living bride, Night unto day is married, morn unto eventide, Earth a merry damsel, and heaven a knight so true,And Earth is quite coquettish, and beseemeth in vain to sue.
Emily Dickinson
May, and after a rainy springWe walk streets gallant with rhododendrons.
Alicia Suskin Ostriker
I'm heading for a clean-named placelike Wisconsin, and mad as a jack-o'-lantern, will get therewithout help and nosy proclivities.
John Ashbery
HOUSE Grow high. The devil can't find you. Grow deep. Buddha can't find you. Build a house and live there. Gourd creepers will climb over it, their flowers dazzling at midnight.
Ko Un
Come, drunks and drug-takers; come perverts unnerved!Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit; to whom and wherever deserved.Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless And it isn't for you.
Louise Bogan
Poetry is the least imposition on silence in a world of chatter.
Marvin Bell
Only in Russia poetry is respected--it gets people killed.
Osip Mandelstam
A sentence is like a tune. A memorable sentence gives its emotion a melodic shape. You want to hear it again, say it—in a way, to hum it to yourself. You desire, if only in the sound studio of your imagination, to repeat the physical experience of that sentence. That craving, emotional and intellectual but beginning in the body with a certain gesture of sound, is near the heart of poetry.
Robert Pinsky
When you're a student of poetry, you're lucky if you don't realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop.
Tony Hoagland
If you don't know the kind of person I amand I don't know the kind of person you area pattern that others made may prevail in the worldand following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
William Stafford
from "Semele Recycled"But then your great voice rang out under the skiesmy name!-- and all those private namesfor the parts and places that had loved you best.And they stirred in their nest of hay and dung.The distraught old ladies chasing their lost altar,and the seers pursuing my skull, their lost employment,and the tumbling boys, who wanted the magic marbles,and the runaway groom, and the fisherman's thirteen children,set up such a clamor, with their cries of "Miracle!"that our two bodies met like a thunderclapin midday-- right at the corner of that wretched fieldwith its broken fenceposts and startled, skinny cattle.We fell in a heap on the compost heapand all our loving parts made love at once,while the bystanders cheered and prayed and hid their eyesand then went decently about their business.And here is is, moonlight again; we've bathed in the riverand are sweet and wholesome once more.We kneel side by side in the sand;we worship each other in whispers.But the inner parts remember fermenting hay,the comfortable odor of dung, the animal incense,and passion, its bloody labor,its birth and rebirth and decay.
Carolyn Kizer
O dear Himalaya...why are you so amazing, can I kiss your peak or can I just let your silence speak...O dear Himalaya...
Santosh Kalwar
Nobody knows the aftermath.
Santosh Kalwar
The birth of a true poet is neither an insignificant event nor an easy delivery. Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to volunteer the intricate machinery of its blood and prayers and muscles for a gestation period much longer than nine months or even nine years.
Aberjhani
We can’t choose our poetic fathers any more than our biological ones — but we can choose how to come to terms with them.
Rodger Kamenetz
For a lot of people, poetry tends to be dull. It's not read much. It takes a special kind of training and a lot of practice to read poetry with pleasure. It's like learning to like asparagus.
Thomas M. Disch
Some thirty inches from my noseThe frontier of my Person goes,And all the untilled air betweenIs private pagus or demesne.Stranger, unless with bedroom eyesI beckon you to fraternize,Beware of rudely crossing it:I have no gun, but I can spit.
W.H. Auden
We lay our words like tenuous plats, build a bridge over itsunsinkable depth: Not a sea of longing,but the brack of wanting what’s physicalto help us forget we are physical.
Cate Marvin
Make me, dear Lord, polite and kind, To everyone, I pray.And may I ask you how you find Yourself, dear Lord, today?
John B. Tabb