Poetry Quotes - Page 28

In the beginning was the word, and primitive societies venerated poets second only to their leaders. A poet had the power to name and so to control; he was, literally, the living memory of a group or tribe who would perpetuate their history in song; his inspiration was god given and he was in effect a medium.

Kevin Crossley-Holland

Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Royal Academy, or the old masters may be supposed to have on a Browning or a Tennyson. Indeed it seems to me that an exact homology exists between painting and poetry on the one hand and modem chemistry and modem algebra on the other. In poetry and algebra we have the pure idea elaborated and expressed through the vehicle of language, in painting and chemistry the idea enveloped in matter, depending in part on manual processes and the resources of art for its due manifestation.

James Joseph Sylvester

He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)

Jeanette Winterson

A Blessing on the PoetsPatient earth-digger, impatient fire-maker,Hungry word-taker and roving sound-lover,Sharer and saver, muser and acher,You who are open to hide or uncover,Time-keeper and –hater, wake-sleeper, sleep-waker;May language’s language, the silence that liesUnder each word, move you over and over,Turning you, wondering, back to surprise.

Annie Finch

The nature of poemsIs a matter of words and deedsAn intimate encounter of voiceIn the ache of the heartIn the labor of breathingA hesitant casting of eyesAway from the mundane to seeThat delicate and shiny thingIn the oddly prosaic rock pileAn extravagance of conceitAn abundance of graceA prayer for words to speak

Kendall Dana Lockerman

Poetry helps heal wounds.Makes them tangible.At the poetry reading I reada poem.A prophecy I wrote down. Almost couldn't go through with it.But it came outhurried and hotand by the endmy tongue was on fire.

Isabel Quintero

The best grammarian still can't write a verse.

Dagobert D. Runes

There are no barriers to poetry or prophecy; by their nature they are barrier-breakers, bursts of perceptions, lines into infinity. If the poet lies about his vision he lies about himself and in himself; this produces a true barrier.

Lenore Kandel

Euphemisms chosen by fear are a covenant with hypocrisy and will immediately destroy the poem and eventually destroy the poet.

Lenore Kandel

Poetry is the art of using language to transcend language.

Laurence Overmire

Poetry is the struggle against the simplification, codification, and mummification of language, it serves as a constant redirect - moving us to the experience to which the words point.

Billy Marshall-Stoneking

It was curious what trying to speak English had done lately to his mind; it reminded him of studying poetry in college, words gaining and losing their meaning, overlapping with images, the curious echo of ideas behind the words people used.

Jess Walter

You are the language so universalyou are forgottenBe my linguistTurn meinto your words.

Bänoo Zan

For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.

Donna Tartt

If you look a word up in the dictionary and twenty minutes later you're still wandering around in the dictionary, you probably have the most basic equipment you need to be a poet.

Billy Collins

I did not foresee my words becoming such a reverie of mimic and refrain.

Joshua Kryah

Spirituality is the poetry of our experience. Science is the gauge of our reality. Together, they create the essence of our humanity.

Steve Maraboli

Oh, Youth may listen patiently,While sad Experience tells her tale,But Doubt sits smiling in his eye,For ardent Hope will still prevail!He hears how feeble Pleasure dies,By guilt destroyed, and pain and woe;He turns to Hope—and she replies,“Believe it not-it is not so!

Anne Brontë

I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.

Ben Lerner

Poetry is alive because it is a medium of vision and experience. It is not necessarily comfortable.It is not necessarily safe.

Lenore Kandel

I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean--in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

Audre Lorde

Experience taught me that when pride wins... we all lose.

Alfa H

There is an Anglo-Saxon form of riddling that plays with the polarities of words like bright and dark, cold and warm, throwing them against one another and crafting lines of rich, humorous nonsense like this poem that has been around for so many hundreds of years that you just have to sit back and, with nothing else in mind, laugh out loud.

Gerald Hausman

The children walk away from me, flick flickety off at a tangent between thin blotched beech trunks, then turn like yo-yos at the end of their strings and come back to me" from the poem "In a BishopsWood Clearing

Jay Woodman

From the time I began to read, as a child, I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap; I loved the crisp whisper of a page turning, the musky odor of old paper and the sharp inky whiff of new pages. Leather bindings sent me into ecstasy. I even loved to gaze at a closed book and daydream about the possibilities inside.

Rita Dove

Up the still, glistening beaches,Up the creeks we will hie,Over banks of bright seaweedThe ebb-tide leaves dry.We will gaze, from the sand-hills,At the white, sleeping town;At the church on the hill-side—And then come back down.Singing: "There dwells a loved one,But cruel is she!She left lonely for everThe kings of the sea.(from poem 'The Forsaken Merman')

Matthew Arnold

I went out to the hazel woodbecause a fire was in my headcut and peeled a hazel wandand hooked a berry to a threadand when white moths were on the wingand moth-like stars were flickering outI dropped the berry in a stream,and caught a little silver trout....(Song of Wandering Aengus)

W.B. Yeats

Keep Moving...Move forwardLet go Give inDecideand just DoProgress every dayAnd make one step forward no matter what's in your wayKeep moving, till one day you wake up and you're there.

Emma Daley

For [W. B.] Yeats magic was not so much a kind of poetry as poetry a kind of magic, and the object of both alike was evocation of energies and knowledge from beyond normal consciousness.

Kathleen Raine

Love leads us to write poetry because love improves our hearing; like prayer, poetry is every bit as much about listening as it is about speaking. To 'get' the poem is to hear the eloquence of the silence that it calls forth through its manifestation of love.

David Patterson

Secure in his flightRider on the constant windsHawk flies through his daysLooks then to the eastPrompted by fate’s gentle breezeChanges his intentFate’s gentle breezesMove the mighty heart to changeDestiny remade

Steve Robison

That's what I love about poetry. The more abstract, the better. The stuff where you're not sure what the poet's talking about. You may have an idea, but you can't be sure. Not a hundred percent. Each word, specifically chosen, could have a million different meanings.

Jay Asher

So Lightning says to Mud,“What would happen if I struck your blood?”And Mud says, “Brother, It would hurt, And make me the motherOf every living thing.But, Fire Boy, you ain’t lifting my grass skirtUntil you burn me a ring.

Sherman Alexie

So this is love:the Sculptor’s chisel.And stone, which in its whole lifedoes not utter a single word,suddenly sings.

Milan Rúfus

My cup is yellowOr not, though not'sImpossibleIt's yellow

Aram Saroyan

Sure, we thought the acresThat we tilled were sacred,But how could we have knownThat wheat can haunt like ghosts

Sherman Alexie

Walk the midway and hear the carnival barker.Come see the freak named after his deceased father.Come see the prince who wants to abdicate his throne.Come see the son whose name is carved on a gravestone.

Sherman Alexie

Today I write,riots with insite!Tomorrow I read,take the lead!Sometimes I sleep, health to keep!But for now I write,and got no gripe!

Leslie Austin

And you know what the worst thing was?The worst thing was that nobody ever believed how hard we tried.

Jack McCarthy

I would say poetry is language charged with emotion. It's words, rhythmically organized . . . A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has any worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.

William Carlos Williams

...feel the fierce way desiretourniquets itself around you andclingsClubland South of Market tweak-chic trannies powder their noses frombullet-shaped compacts and flick their forkedtongues like switchblades as they burn the nightdown bleed day to night to day toMission sidewalks where pythons hidetwenty dollar balloons beneath their tongues whichget bartered in smiles quicker than a coke buzz andtossed out through the cracksCottonmouth kissescamouflage emotions andstrike with a vengeancewhen hewants and shewants and theywant and Iwon'tGenet was right, I supposewhen he wrote "The only wayto avoid the horror of horror isto give in to it"it'sthe nature ofthe economy of thebusiness it's thenature ofthings...

Clint Catalyst

Shine and shimmer my Harvest Moon,illuminate the shadows in the sky.

A.F. Stewart

The moon twangs its silver strings;The river swoons into town;The wind beds down in the pines,Covers itself with stars.

George Elliott Clarke

In school, I hated poetry - those skinny,Malnourished poems that professors love;The bad grammar and dirty words that catchIn the mouth like fishhooks, tear holes in speech.Pablo, your words are rain I run through,Grass I sleep in.

George Elliott Clarke

I listen to the rainfall, my words wanna flow!Droplets run down the wall,where do they go?Letters in the raw,mesh together for the show!

Leslie Austin

Another breath, left to translate

Susan Voth

Bombs on my backpack lunchbox full of fivestar crackers pockets loaded with rockets im gonna spit fireworks explosive rhymes connected like judas belt here comes my ride a mother rocket fly so high reach and bursts into the night sky

patrick cruz

I plan to be a sinner tonight. Could've been something else, but looked way too good in my red dress to be anything Christian.

Alysia Harris

Time Out To Cry ©All alone at the end of the dayThe time, just a little past tenEvening has come for a short stayIt’s time for her sorrow againThe smile on her face she’s been holdingSuddenly, she lets fallAnd the feelings begin unfoldingShe comes out of her personal wallAs the world settles down for the nightShe awakens herself from a dreamAnd the girl they all thought had her life going rightIs no longer the image she’d seemShe takes off the disguise she’s been wearingThen opens her heart to the truthBehind closed doors she’s not caringAbout life or love in her youthSo she sits by the mirror spilling tearsAnd cries by herself in the darkA whole day of acting like she has no fearsTakes a lot from an empty heartInside she’s lonely and sadBut acts like she's fine in the dayRevealing her misery, secretly wishing she hadA friend, or a promise to stayShe’s ashamed of the truth she’s been keepingLiving her hours in daylight a lieAnd this is the reason for in darkness she’s weepingTaking time out from each day to cryWritten by Shannen WrassCopyright © 1995 Shannen Wrass. All Rights Reserved

Shannen Wrass

LESLIE CHEUNG JUMPS OFF MY BUILDING CLOSES HIS EYES AND THEN SINGS A SONGWE BOTH KNOW AND LOVE// LESLIE CHEUNG SE TIRA DESDE MI EDIFICIOCIERRA SUS OJOS Y LUEGO CANTA UNA CANCIÓNQUE LOS DOS CONOCEMOS Y QUE NOS ENCANTA

Richard Chiem

Until we say the truth, there can be no tenderness.As long as there is desire, we will not be safe

Tony Hoagland

You take my breath awayFrom mile awayHair, twice as niceSmile is your make up, angelic faceYou light up the entire placeCaptured my attentionCan't help but stare at your perfectionso charming, You will set the red carpet on fireWith that amazing attireBest dress among the restPretty girls are envy in your beautyAnd one of a kind personality

patrick cruz

These aren't still shots; the camera is always moving. And the scene is always just slipping out of sight, as if in spite of myself I were always descending a hill, rounding a corner, stepping into the street with a companion who urges me on, while I look back over my shoulder at the sight which recedes, vanishes. The present of my consciousness is itself a mystery which is also always just rounding a bend like a floating branch borne by a flood. Where am I? But I'm not. "I will overturn, overturn, overturn, it: and it shall be no more. . . .

Annie Dillard

I have to find a place to hideAn island in the seaSurrounded by a racing tideWhere I can live with me

Laurie Matthew

Don't ask me any questions. I've seen how things that seek their way find their void instead.

Federico García Lorca

Today I introduced myself to my very own Heart,In silent agony, after all these years it bled apart.

Ankita Singhal

if onlyour tongueswere made of glasshow muchmore carefulwe would bewhen wespeak

Shaun Shane

I walk with a dual longing for life and for death.

Melissa Lee-Houghton

Tonight, I won't dream, because nobodyhas held me and no hands have strayed and eventhough I'm drunk with love, my arms are empty.

Melissa Lee-Houghton

With a metal heartI came to this life,My head was a crucible, full of elixir.Pearl by pearlMy heart was poured,Drop by dropMy head was splashed.The world was entirely a magnet.

Hersh Saeed

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Poetry Quotes - Page 28

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