Poetry Quotes - Page 71

When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student's concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism.The poet nodded his big head in a sympathetic, rhythmic way as this was explained to him, then told him that there are two kinds of poems. There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars. Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it's fatal to confuse them.In the Seventh Saint, many years later, it had struck him that the difference between himself and Shakespeare wasn't talent - not especially - but nerve. The capacity not to be frightened by his largest and most potent conceptions, to simply (simply!) sit down and execute them. The dreadful lassitude he felt when something really large and multifarious came suddenly clear to him, something Lear-sized yet sonnet-precise. If only they didn't rush on him whole, all at once, massive and perfect, leaving him frightened and nerveless at the prospect of articulating them word by scene by page. He would try to believe they were of the kind told in bars, not the kind to be written, though there was no way to be sure of this except to attempt the writing; he would raise a finger (the novelist in the bar mirror raising the obverse finger) and push forward his change. Wailing like a neglected ghost, the vast notion would beat its wings into the void.Sometimes it would pursue him for days and years as he fled desperately. Sometimes he would turn to face it, and do battle. Once, twice, he had been victorious, objectively at least. Out of an immense concatenation of feeling, thought, word, transcendent meaning had come his first novel, a slim, pageant of a book, tombstone for his slain conception. A publisher had taken it, gingerly; had slipped it quietly into the deep pool of spring releases, where it sank without a ripple, and where he supposes it lies still, its calm Bodoni gone long since green. A second, just as slim but more lurid, nightmarish even, about imaginary murders in an imaginary exotic locale, had been sold for a movie, though the movie had never been made. He felt guilt for the producer's failure (which perhaps the producer didn't feel), having known the book could not be filmed; he had made a large sum, enough to finance years of this kind of thing, on a book whose first printing was largely returned.
John Crowley
Tăcerea coboară-n spiraleRotunde şi-ovale,Ca nişte confeti de-aceeaşi culoare...
Ion Minulescu
To Your eyes a thousand years are like yesterday come and gone, no more than a watch in the night.You sweep men away like a dream, like grass which springs up in the morning.In the morning it springs up and flowers, by evening it withers and fades.So we are destroyed in Your anger, struck with terror in Your fury.Our guilt lies open before You; our secrets in the light of Your face.All our days pass away in Your anger. Our life is over like a sigh.Our span is seventy years or eighty for those who are strong. And most of these are emptiness and pain, they pass swiftly and we are gone.
Anonymous
in der Fußgängerzone kam Wind auf wie immer Wind aufkommt bei der Suche nach jenem richtigen Ort der sich stets weit entfernt zeigt, die Abfallpapiere am Boden verrutschten, mein Mantel flatterte, und, als wäre dies schon ein Grund mich selbst zu den Dingen zu zählen als wäre dies schon ein Grund blieb ich ungefragt stehen
Marion Poschmann
Thinking has a quiet skin. But I feel the and of things inside it. Blue hills most gentle in calm light, then stretches of assailAnd ransack. Such tangles of charred wreckage, shrapnel-bits Singling and singeing where they fall. I feel the stumbling gait of what I am,The quiet uproar of undone, how to be hidden is a tempting, violent thing— Each thought breaking always in another.All the unlawful elsewheres rushing in.
Laure Sheck
When I took my poetry class in school. I read an e. e. cummings poem. I don’t mind eels except how they feels and maybe as meals. I knew there was hope for me.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
I could give all to Time except -- exceptWhat I myself have held. But why declareThe things forbidden that while the Customs sleptI have crossed to Safety with? For I am There,And what I would not part with I have kept.
Robert Frost
The life spills over, some days.She cannot be at rest,Wishes she could explodeLike that red tree—The one that bursts into fireAll this week.Senses her infinite smallnessBut can’t seize it,Recognizes the folly of desire,The folly of withdrawal—Kicks at the curb, the pavement,If only she could, at this moment,When what she’s doing is ploddingTo the bus stop, to go to school,Passing that fiery tree—if only she couldBe making love,Be making a painting,Be exploding, be speeding through the universeLike a photon, like a showerOf yellow flames—She believes if she could only catch upWith the riding rhythm of things, of her own electrons,Then she would be at rest—If she could forget school,Climb the tree,Be the tree,burn like that.
Alicia Suskin Ostriker
A poem is a frozen momentmelted by each reader for themselvesto flow into the here and now.
Hilde Domin
When people talk about poetry as a project, they suggest that the road through a poem is a single line. When really the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exist. I can’t suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy—or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn’t shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped (including the shapes of the trees along the constellation-road). A great poet knows never to expect sun or rain or cold or wind in the process of creating a poem. In a great poem all can come to the fore at once. It would be worse yet, if none are there at all.
Dorothea Lasky
I’ve come down from the skylike some damned ghost, delayedtoo long…To the abandoned fieldsthe trees returned and grew.They stand and grow. Time comesTo them, time goes, the treesStand; the only placeThey go is where they are.Those wholly patient ones…They do no wrong, and theyAre beautiful. What moreCould we have thought to ask?...I stand and wait for lightto open the dark night.I stand and wait for prayerto come and find me here.” Sabbaths 2000 IX
Wendell Berry
Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.
A.R. Ammons
Men call you fayre, and you doe credit it,For that your self ye daily such doe see:But the trew fayre, that is the gentle wit,And vertuous mind, is much more praysd of me.For all the rest, how ever fayre it be,Shall turne to nought and loose that glorious hew:But onely that is permanent and freeFrom frayle corruption, that doth flesh ensew.That is true beautie: that doth argue youTo be divine and borne of heavenly seed:Deriv'd from that fayre Spirit, from whom al trueAnd perfect beauty did at first proceed.He onely fayre, and what he fayre hath made,All other fayre lyke flowres untymely fade.
Edmund Spenser
How hard it is, to be forced to the conclusion that people should be, nine tenths of the time, left alone! - When there is that in me that longs for absolute commitment. One of the poem-ideas I had was that one could respect only the people who knew that cups had to be washed up and put away after drinking, and knew that a Monday of work follows a Sunday in the water meadows, and that old age with its distorting-mirror memories follows youth and its raw pleasures, but that it's quite impossible to love such people, for what we want in love is release from our beliefs, not confirmation in them. That is where the 'courage of love' comes in - to have the courage to commit yourself to something you don't believe, because it is what - for the moment, anyway - thrills your by its audacity. (Some of the phrasing of this is odd, but it would make a good poem if it had any words...)
Philip Larkin
How they are all about, these gentlemenIn chamberlains' apparel, stocked and laced,Like night around their order's star and gemAnd growing ever darker, stony-faced,And these, their ladies, fragile, wan, but proppedHigh by their bodice, one hand loosely dropped,Small like its collar, on the toy King-Charles:How they surround each one of these who stoppedTo read and contemplate the objects d'art,Of which some pieces still are theirs, not ours.Whit exquisite decorum they allow usA life of whose dimensions we seem sureAnd which they cannot grasp. They were aliveTo bloom, that is be fair; we, to mature,That is to be of darkness and to strive.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Rather a thousand times the county jail than to lie under this marble figure with wings and this granite pedestal bearing the words "pro patria." What do they mean anyway?
Edgar Lee Masters
the inletour friend looks as he didwhen we first knew him,and until I wake I believeI will die of grief, for I knowthat this boy grew into a manwho was a faithful friendwho died.
Wendell Berry
Onwetend van dit alles maakte ik eind vorige eeuw mijn entree in dit discours door aan een tijdschrift te vertellen dat poëzie volgens mij entertainment is. Als iemand dat platvloers vindt, voegde ik er behulpzaam aan toe, had hij volgens mij een te lage dunk van entertainment.
Ingmar Heytze
Cut off from the land that bore us,Betrayed by the land we find,Where the brightest have gone before us,And the dullest are most behind - Stand, stand to your glasses, steady!'T is all we have left to prize:One cup to the dead already - Hurrah for the next that dies!
Bartholomew Dowling
A poet is a verb that blossoms light in gardens of dawn, or sometimes midnight.
Aberjhani
Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
Criss Jami
There is a master way with words which is not learned but is instead developed: a deaf man develops exceptional vision, a blind man exceptional hearing, a silent man, when given a piece of paper...
Criss Jami
There is only beauty / and it has only one perfect expression / poetry. All the rest is a lie /except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul.
Stéphane Mallarmé
Language signifies when instead of copying thought it lets itself be taken apart and put together again by thought. Language bears the sense of thought as a footprint signifies the movement and effort of a body. The empirical use of already established language should be distinguished from its creative use. Empirical language can only be the result of creative language. Speech in the sense of empirical language - that is, the opportune recollection of a preestablished sign – is not speech in respect to an authentic language. It is, as Mallarmé said, the worn coin placed silently in my hand. True speech, on the contrary - speech which signifies, which finally renders "l'absente de tous bouquets" present and frees the sense captive in the thing - is only silence in respect to empirical usage, for it does not go so far as to become a common noun. Language is oblique and autonomous, and if it sometimes signifies a thought or a thing directly, that is only a secondary power derived from its inner life. Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has only to do with the language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by sense.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
I wouldn't be surprised if poetry - poetry in the broadest sense, in the sense of a world filled with metaphor, rhyme, and recurring patterns, shapes, and designs - is how the world works. The world isn't logical; it's a song.
David Byrne
I leave the kitchen table to bathe, and to dress for church. If only my closet held on its shelves an array of faces I could wear rather than dresses, I would know which face to put on today. As for the dresses, I haven't a clue.
Tim Cummings
It is probably always disastrous not to be a poet.
Lytton Strachey
Literature is news which stays news.
Ezra Pound
We are metered only by our own machines,while the book is a clock that forgets her machanics.
Amy King
Demander à la poésie du sentimentalisme ... ce n'est pas ça. Des mots rayonnants, des mots de lumière ... avec un rythme et une musique, voilà ce que c'est, la poésie.
Théophile Gautier
He is a Londoner, too, in his writings. In his familiar letters he displays a rambling urban vivacity, a tendency to to veer off the point and to muddle his syntax. He had a brilliantly eclectic mind, picking up words and images while at the same time forging them in new and unexpected combinations. He conceived several ideas all at once, and sometimes forgot to separate them into their component parts. This was true of his lectures, too, in which brilliant perceptions were scattered in a wilderness of words. As he wrote on another occasion, "The lake babbled not less, and the wind murmured not, nor the little fishes leaped for joy that their tormentor was not." This strangely contorted and convoluted style also characterizes his verses, most of which were appended as commentaries upon his paintings. Like Blake, whose prophetic books bring words and images in exalted combination, Turner wished to make a complete statement. Like Blake, he seemed to consider the poet's role as being in part prophetic. His was a voice calling in the wilderness, and, perhaps secretly, he had an elevated sense of his status and his vocation. And like Blake, too, he was often considered to be mad. He lacked, however, the poetic genius of Blake - compensated perhaps by the fact that by general agreement he is the greater artist.
Peter Ackroyd
Kretanje je duša svega što drhti.Započinje tako da se prvo dogodi trenutakonima koji žive trenutak,a onda se, onima koji žive vječnost,vječnost nametne kao bolest.
Kemal Mujičić Artnam
A little bunny or some kind of ferret was probablythere too, and bore witness as only rodents can.
John Ashbery
If you have a fight work it out, don't get out
Angel Silva
They miss the whisper that runsany day in your mind,"Who are you really, wanderer?"--and the answer you have to giveno matter how dark and coldthe world around you is:"Maybe I'm a king.
William Stafford
the bouquetBetween me and the worldyou are a bay, a sailthe faithful ends of a ropeyou are a fountain, a wind, a shrill childhood cry.Between me and the worldyou are a picture frame, a windowa field covered in wildflowersyou are a breath, a bed,a night that keeps the stars company.Between me and the world, you are a calendar, a compassa ray of light that slips through the gloomyou are a biographical sketch, a book marka preface that comes at the end.between me and the worldyou are a gauze curtain, a mista lamp shining in my dreamsyou are a bamboo flute, a song without wordsa closed eyelid carved in stone.Between me and the worldyou are a chasm, a poolan abyss plunging downyou are a balustrade, a walla shield’s eternal pattern.
Bei Dao
The WeaverMy life is but a weavingbetween my Lord and me;I cannot choose the colorsHe worketh steadily.Oft times He weaveth sorrowAnd I, in foolish pride,Forget He sees the upper,And I the underside.Not til the loom is silentAnd the shuttles cease to fly,Shall God unroll the canvasAnd explain the reason why.The dark threads are as needfulIn the Weaver's skillful hand,As the threads of gold and silverIn the pattern He has planned.
Benjamin Malachi Franklin
The image of a wood has appeared often enough in English verse. It has indeed appeared so often that it has gathered a good deal of verse into itself; so that it has become a great forest where, with long leagues of changing green between them, strange episodes of poetry have taken place. Thus in one part there are lovers of a midsummer night, or by day a duke and his followers, and in another men behind branches so that the wood seems moving, and in another a girl separated from her two lordly young brothers, and in another a poet listening to a nightingale but rather dreaming richly of the grand art than there exploring it, and there are other inhabitants, belonging even more closely to the wood, dryads, fairies, an enchanter's rout. The forest itself has different names in different tongues- Westermain, Arden, Birnam, Broceliande; and in places there are separate trees named, such as that on the outskirts against which a young Northern poet saw a spectral wanderer leaning, or, in the unexplored centre of which only rumours reach even poetry, Igdrasil of one myth, or the Trees of Knowledge and Life of another. So that indeed the whole earth seems to become this one enormous forest, and our longest and most stable civilizations are only clearings in the midst of it.
Charles Williams
The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre. For the world is not painted, or adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. Therefore the poet is not any permissive potentate, but is emperor in his own right. Criticism is infested with a cant of materialism, which assumes that manual skill and activity is the first merit of all men, and disparages such as say and do not, overlooking the fact, that some men, namely, poets, are natural sayers, sent into the world to the end of expression, and confounds them with those whose province is action, but who quit it to imitate the sayers. The poet does not wait for the hero or the sage, but, as they act and think primarily, so he writes primarily what will and must be spoken, reckoning the others, though primaries also, yet, in respect to him, secondaries and servants; as sitters or models in the studio of a painter, or as assistants who bring building materials to an architect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thoughtAs doth eternity...
John Keats
How can love's spaciousnessbe conveyed in the narrowconfines of one syllable?
Diane Ackerman
The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs.
Philip Larkin
When Rachel Carson accepted the National Book Award, she said, 'if there is poetry in my book about the sea it is not because I deliberately put it there but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out poetry.
Jim Lynch
The music of revelation announces itself to the reader in somber brooding tones or in melodies light as air and one is invited to dance with the most captivating of partners: poetry.
Aberjhani
When we lose these woods, we lose our soul. Not simply as individuals, but as a people.
Kevin Walker
A tree forms itself in answerto its place and the light.Explain it how you will, the onlything explainable will beyour explanation.” Sabbaths 1999 IV
Wendell Berry
Two things consistently bring me pleasure: hot sweet tea and writing. Which is not to say that either are particularly good for me…I use entirely too much sugar and so far don’t find sucralose to be a good alternative. Also, writing is not a practice that engenders confidence. Quite the opposite. It’s about making yourself deliberately insecure so that you can write the next thing and have it be worth reading.And that’s not even taking into consideration the business end of things, which can make you bitter if you’re not careful…But I’ve spent my the bulk of my life to date figuring out the right mix of fat and sugar in my tea and also, how to get incrementally better (I hope…) at the writing, so I’m not giving it/them up!
Ariel Gordon
Say you could view a time lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.”The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting, and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up- mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back. A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash-frames.Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and crumble, like paths of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any image but the hunched shadowless figures of ghosts.Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.
Annie Dillard
Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of 'ideal' poems that one feels ought to be written, but don't because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A 'real' poem is a pleasure to write.
Philip Larkin
Poetry is not an art, it's a symptom.
Michele Brenton
Every poet will forever try to write the greatest poem ever written, I have found that this kind of poem can be written with “One” word. And that word consists of a beauty beyond any measure to man and one of the most beauty creations to grace the presents of man. That one word poem is…….. “YOU
Michael Jones
Poetry is the guardian of love - constructed from truth it is a bridge that can be crossed from either side and it is oblivious of age or gender
Rodney Compton
Love could never be forever only for a lifetime, only God can love eternally.
Jeannette Scollard
For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.
William H. Gass
Writing poetry is supernatural. Or, it should be.
Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
I notice you have the assault proof vest -So it's my fault I guess.So apparently I didn't say 'no' as loud as my clothes could say 'yes.'You see I didn't know that my ‘no’ wasn't enough -I didn't understand that my body became less precious because certain dresses make me look hot.And I guess if I'm wearing the wrong topthen my ‘yes’ is the same as ‘stop.’And you shouldn't have to, just because I begged you to.I'm begging you -Tell me the magic outfit and I'll buy it.Apparently my ‘no’ wasn't heard,even when I screamed.So I need my clothes to be quiet.
Connell
I walk through the old yellow sunlightto get to my kitchen tablethe poem about melying there with the booksin which I am listedamong the dead and future Dylans
Leonard Cohen
I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.
William Stafford
Jag föddes för att kränga rosor på de dödas avenyer
Charles Bukowski
Haunted by demons of the past, hounded by demons not yet met, the nevermore and evermore left her little peace.” ~A Tale of Two Women
Kimberly Kinrade

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