Quotes by Poets - Page 426

Music resembles poetry, in eachAre nameless graces which no methods teach,And which a master hand alone can reach.
Alexander Pope
I sing the song of my heartstrings, alone in the eternal muteness, in the face of God.
Yone Noguchi
I take thee at thy word:Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized;Henceforth I never will be Romeo.
William Shakespeare
The place trembled with sound. I didn't need to do anything. They would do it all. But you had to be careful. Drunk as they were they could immediately detect any false gesture, any false word. You could never underestimate an audience. They had paid to get in; they had paid for drinks; they intended to get something and if you didn't give it to them they'd run you right into the ocean.
Charles Bukowski
Thơ ca là thứ vô cùng phù phiếm nhưng vô cùng thiêng liêng. Tôi tin ngay. Cũng như tôi tin ở trền đời có những thứ vô cùng thiêng liêng nhưng vô cùng phù phiếm.
Nguyễn Nhật Ánh
I would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural pleasures of language - a happiness we were born to have.
Frances Mayes
yo te amo para comenzar a amarte,para recomenzar el infinitoy para no dejar de amarte nunca:por eso no te amo todavía.
Pablo Neruda
one must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one’s own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others
Allen Ginsberg
...much of poetry in the making is the fiddle with a few items. You lay a word against another and wait. You try another word. And another. Yet another. You wait. You begin again. Listening. Looking. For the elusive inevitable thing which has to arrive before it is recognised. And, like Odysseus, may not be recognised at first.
Craig Raine
The touch of your fingersgrazing minedelicate asa single drop of winein a crystal goblet.Rolling it round,I savor it on my tongue,try tomake it lastforever.The words Iloveyouform in the airand melt. Your palm againstmy cheek,light asa snowflake.
Eve Merriam
Here they have no time for the fine gracesof poetry, unless it freely growsin deep compulsion, like water in the well,woven into the texture of the soilin a strong pattern.
Iain Crichton Smith
Mi táctica es mirarte aprender como sos quererte como sosmi táctica es hablarte y escucharte construir con palabras un puente indestructiblemi táctica es quedarme en tu recuerdo no sé cómo ni sé con qué pretexto pero quedarme en vosmi táctica es ser franco y saber que sos franca y que no nos vendamos simulacros para que entre los dosno haya telón ni abismosmi estrategia es en cambio más profunda y más simple mi estrategia es que un día cualquiera no sé cómo ni sé con qué pretexto por fin me necesites
Mario Benedetti Táctica y estrategia
From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your roomAnd made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking upFrom your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's allThere was to it.
Mark Strand
We made love outdoors—without a roof, I like most, without stove, my favorite place, assuming the weather be fair and balmy, and the earth beneath be clean. Our souls intertwined and dripping with dew, and our love for each other was seen. Our love for the world was new.
Roman Payne
To Have Without Holding:Learning to love differently is hard,love with the hands wide open, lovewith the doors banging on their hinges,the cupboard unlocked, the windroaring and whimpering in the roomsrustling the sheets and snapping the blindsthat thwack like rubber bandsin an open palm.It hurts to love wide openstretching the muscles that feelas if they are made of wet plaster,then of blunt knives, thenof sharp knives.It hurts to thwart the reflexesof grab, of clutch, to love and letgo again and again. It pesters to rememberthe lover who is not in the bed,to hold back what is owed to the workthat gutters like a candle in a cavewithout air, to love consciously,conscientiously, concretely, constructively.I can't do it, you say it's killingme, but you thrive, you glowon the street like a neon raspberry,You float and sail, a helium balloonbright bachelor's buttons blue and bobbingon the cold and hot winds of our breath,as we make and unmake in passionatediastole and systole the rhythmof our unbound bonding, to haveand not to hold, to lovewith minimized malice, hungerand anger moment by moment balanced.
Marge Piercy
Why there isn't any drama in my lifeSo I'll crawl on the cottonfield with a fifeWhy to have a dream in vain my life begsAm a house gecko, I eat flies and lay eggsMy death surely doesn't yield a headline and allI'll break law by pissing on a castle's wallFor my death there wouldn't be a weeping meniFrom the name of Lady Canning there's ledikeniOne foot on heaven and one foot on hell, hangingOne cannon and two cannonballs dangling.
Nabarun Bhattacharya
You ask me why I don't speakNot a word at willBut write so much worth well over a mill'Well I value words like I value kissesA sober one, a closer one penetrates the heartDarling it's how it mends it
Criss Jami
Where were you then?Who else was there?Saying what?Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly when I am sad and feel you are far away?
Pablo Neruda
Now therefore, while the youthful hue Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpiresAt every pore with instant fires, Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Andrew Marvell
And yet this self, containsTides, continents and stars―a myriad selves,Is small and solitary as one grass-bladePassed over by the windAmongst a myriad grasses on the prairie.
Cecil Day-Lewis
Still must the poet as of old,In barren attic bleak and cold,Starve, freeze, and fashion verses toSuch things as flowers and song and you;Still as of old his being giveIn Beauty's name, while she may live,Beauty that may not die as longAs there are flowers and you and song.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Man is no star, but a quick coalOf mortal fire:Who blows it not, nor doth controlA faint desire,
George Herbert
Alles wat ik van het leven weet maakte ik me buiten de muren van de school eigen, en zodra ik me binnen die muren bevond leek het of ik achterwaarts leefde.
Gerrit Komrij
A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
An orphan's curse would drag to hell A spirit from on high; But oh! more horrible than that Is the curse in a dead man's eye! Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse, And yet I could not die.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
the glory of the protagonist is always paid for by a lot of secondary characters
Tony Hoagland
Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.
May Sarton
As when, O lady mine,With chiselled touchThe stone unhewn and coldBecomes a living mould,The more the marble wastes,The more the statue grows.
Michelangelo Buonarroti
Some women marry houses.
Anne Sexton
I’m happy. But some beauty is nonesuch - The gently sloping path across the wood, The wretched bridge that’s just a little skewed And that, for which, I won’t be waiting much.
Anna Akhmatova
Hill tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun, And the rivers we're eying burn to gold as they run; Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air; Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.
John Clare
To be the other womanis to be a seasonthat is always about to end,when the air is floweredwith jasmine and peach,and the weather day after dayis flawless,and the forecastis hurricane.
Linda Pastan
‘Paradise Lost’ was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully.
Robert Hass
Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.
Robert W. Service
PRETENDING TO DROWNThe only regret is that I waitedlonger than a breathto scatter the sun's reflectionwith my body.New stars burst upon the waterwhen you pulled me in.On the shore, our clothesbegged us to be good boys again.Every stick our feet toucheda snapping turtle, every shadowa water moccasin.Excuses to swim closer to one another.I sank into the depths to see youas the lake saw you: cut in halfby the surface, taut legs kicking,the rest of you sky.Suddenly still, a clear viewof what you knew I wantedto see.When I resurfaced, slick grin,knowing glance; you pushed meback under.I pretended to drown,then swallowed you whole.
Saeed Jones
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.Eagerly I wished the morrow; — vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow — sorrow for the lost Lenore.
Edgar Allan Poe
we must bringour own lightto thedarkness.
Charles Bukowski
Stardust
If you came to me with a face I have not seen, with a voice I have never heard, I would still know you. Even if centuries separated us, I would still feel you. Somewhere between the sand and the stardust, through every collapse and creation, there is a pulse that echoes of you and I.
When we leave this world, we give up all our possessions and our memories. Love is the only thing we take with us. It is all we carry from one life to the next.
Lang Leav
I fall asleepCall it deep while all is well be-Cause my life seems like a freestyle mean-While asleep on the couch I dream it's a written piece and nowThe symphony's soundingShouting out to these feet whose leaps feel foul but quite loudBut howI'm allowed to live my dreamsMy Chimeran team brings the Siberian breedRiding reality free 'til these tires they freezeIn mires in dire need of wires, fire and heat butI love a dark, hard cold heart in the wintery breeze
Criss Jami
Matched with an aged wife, I mete and doleUnequal laws unto a savage race,That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
Alfred Tennyson
The inkstand is full of ink, and the paper lies white and unspotted, in the round of light thrown by a candle. Puffs of darkness sweep into the corners, and keep rolling through the room behind his chair. The air is silver and pearl, for the night is liquid with moonlight.See how the roof glitters, like ice!Over there, a slice of yellow cuts into the silver-blue, and beside it stand two geraniums, purple because the light is silver-blue, to-night.
Amy Lowell
If the incision of our words amounts to nothing but a feeling, a slow motion, it will still cut a better swath than the factory model, the corporate model, the penitentiary model, which by my lights are one and the same.
C.D. Wright
Poetry is the sound of the human animal.
Suniti Namjoshi
Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
Thom Gunn
I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill.
Wallace Stevens
Many have referred to [Lewis] Carroll's rhymes as nonsense, but in my childhood world — Los Angeles in the '50s — they made perfect sense.
Wanda Coleman
Up the airy mountain,Down the rushy glen,We daren't go a-huntingFor fear of little men.
William Allingham
Poetry is a will to put things right, an imaginary solution, a way of avoiding a catastrophe that already happened. Poetry is an escape, perhaps intelligent, perhaps idiotic, from a senile situation. It is a dialectical movement, it keeps tearing open the wounds while trying to heal them. Here we see the only acceptable path open up towards an existence worthy of human beings. Here the seriousness is unfaltering and absolute. Where it will lead no one knows.
Aase Berg
I care for you, darling, I love you,the only reason I fucked L. is because you fuckedZ. and then I fucked R. and you fucked N.and because you fucked N. I had to fuckY. But I think of you constantly, I feel youhere in my belly like a baby, love I'd call it,no matter what happens I'd call it love, and soyou fucked C. and then before I could moveyou fucked W., so I had to fuck D. ButI want you to know that I love you, I think of youconstantly, I don't think I've ever loved anybodylike I love you.
Charles Bukowski
The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the ideas in modern prose which the lichened colleges presented in old poetry. Even some of those antiques might have been called prose when they were new. They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.
Thomas Hardy
Author's PrayerIf I speak for the dead, I mustleave this animal of my body,I must write the same poem over and overfor the empty page is a white flag of their surrender.If I speak of them, I must walkon the edge of myself, I must live as a blind manwho runs through the rooms withouttouching the furniture.Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking "What yearis it?"I can dance in my sleep and laughin front of the mirror.Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,I will praise your madness, andin a language not mine, speakof music that wakes us, musicin which we move. For whatever I sayis a kind of petition and the darkest daysmust I praise.
Ilya Kaminsky
Now is History as fast as the mind remembers.
Kirby Wright
The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant.
Denise Levertov
What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.
Elizabeth Alexander
Freedom is the dream you dreamWhile putting thought in chains again --
Giacomo Leopardi
it isn't that we're alone or not alonewhose voice do you want mine? yours?
Ikkyu
The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.
Muriel Rukeyser
Each arrow you shoot offcarries its own targetinto the decidedlysecrettangle
Paul Celan
rush of pine scent (once upon a time),the unlicensed convictionthere ought to be another wayof sayingthis.
Paul Celan
Breath, dreams, silence, invincible calm, you triumph.
Paul Valéry