Poetry Quotes - Page 74

He taught me to be a Da Vinci and I sit here, with his portraits waiting for him to returnI do not think he willIs that what it means to be humanto be all powerful, to build a temple to yourselfand leaveonly the walls to pray

Phil Kaye

I remember yoursaying: "make itor break it."neither happened anditwon't.

Charles Bukowski

Without the wetness of your love, the fragrance of your water, or the trickling sounds of your voice ― I shall always feel thirsty.

Suzy Kassem

poetrymelts my bones.enters my blood.and changesits composition.

Sanober Khan

FRUITS AND NUTSKeep jumping around them like monkeys.The clones,Commercialized zombies,And the TV junkies.Keep throwing berries,Twigs,And nuts at them.Until they wake upTo see what's up And figure out whyWe're laughing at 'em.

Suzy Kassem

Porque a volar no se aprende solo, pero a caer no se aprende nunca.

Ernesto Pérez Vallejo

What do they think has happened, the old fools,To make them like this? Do they somehow supposeIt's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't rememberWho called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,They could alter things back to when they danced all night,Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?Or do they fancy there's really been no change,And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,Or sat through days of thin continuous dreamingWatching the light move? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange;tttWhy aren't they screaming?

Philip Larkin

I wait on my fix:I am a poetry junkie.

Charles Bukowski

Then there's the twoof us. This wordis far too short for us, it has onlyfour letters, too sparseto fill those deep barevacuums between the starsthat press on us with their deafness.It's not love we don't wishto fall into, but that fear.This word is not enough but it willhave to do. It's a singlevowel in this metallicsilence, a mouth that saysO again and again in wonderand pain, a breath, a fingergrip on a cliffside. You canhold on or let go.

Margaret Atwood

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

A Rough GuideBe polite at the reception desk.Not all the knives are in the museum.The waitresses know that a nice boyis formed in the same way as a deckchair.Pay for the beer and send flowers.Introduce yourself as Richard.Do not refer to what somebody didat a particular time in the past.Remember, every Friday we used to gofor a walk. I walked. You walked.Everything in the past is irregular.This steak is very good. Sit down.There is no wine, but there is ice cream.Eat slowly. I have many matches.

Mark Haddon

It is not growing like a treeIn bulk, doth make Man better be;Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:A lily of a dayIs fairer far in MayAlthough it fall and die that night;It was the plant and flower of Light.In small proportions we just beauties see;And in short measures life may perfect be (Ben Jonson)

Aidan Chambers

. . .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

Tho' you're tired and weary, still journey on, Till you come to your happy abode,Where all the love you've been dreaming of,Will be there at the end of the road.

Harry Lauder

. . . poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value.

Major Jackson

Know that there is often hidden in us a dormant poet, always young and alive.

Paul de Musset

The journey back is always longer than the forward run.

Rod McKuen

And round about there is a rabbleOf the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.They shall inherit the earth.

Ezra Pound

My vegetable love will growVaster than empires, and more slow.

Andrew Marvell

Evil is not good's absence but gravity'severlasting bedrock and its fatal chainsinert, violent, the suffrage of our days.

Geoffrey Hill

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

Yo, múltiple, como en contradicción

Julia de Burgos

My name used to be in the papers dailyAs having dined somewhere,Or traveled somewhere,Or rented a house in Paris,Where I entertained the nobility.I was forever eating or traveling,Or taking the cure at Baden-Baden.Now I am here to do honorTo Spoon River, here beside the family whence I sprang.No one cares now where I dined,Or lived, or whom I entertained,Or how often I took the cure at Baden-Baden!

Edgar Lee Masters

Streets paved with opal sadness,Lead me counterclockwise, to pockets of joy,And jazz.

Bob Kaufman

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

Snub end of a dismal year, deep in the dwarf orchard, The sky with its undercoat of blackwash and point stars,I stand in the dark and answer toMy life, this shirt I want to take off,which is on fire . . .

Charles Wright

Our Beasts and our Thieves and our ChattelsHave weight for good or for ill;But the Poor are only His image,His presence, His word, His will; -And so Lazarus lies at our doorstepAnd Dives neglects him still.

Adelaide Anne Procter

... 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

Lovers meander in prose and rhyme,trying to say-for the thousandth time-what's easier done than said.

Piet Hein

Wer ein Theater füllen will, bedient sich der Dramaturgie. Um es zu leeren genügt Ideologie.

Oliver Hassencamp

When a poet settled down to write a poem, could he foresee the lines he would write? Did his head constantly spin with riddles and rhymes and was his only job to put them down? What if he couldn’t get them to make sense, and no one, not even the person he cared for most, could have pleasure in reading it? What would he do?

Alysha Speer

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

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

Hearing a crow with no mouthCry in the deepDarkness of the night,I feel a longing forMy father before he was born.

Ikkyu

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

A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

E B White

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

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

You bend the nailBut keep hammering becauseHammering makes the world

Dean Young

noone knows and noone seeswe lovers doing what we pleasebut people stop and point at theseten milk bottles a-turning into cheese

Roger McGough

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

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

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

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

Ted: A fucking good poem is a weapon. It's-- and not like a--a popgun or something.- It's a bomb.It's like a bloody big bomb. Sylvia: That’s why they make childrenlearn them in school.They don't want them messing aboutwith them on their own. I mean, just imagineif a sonnet went off accidentally. Boom.

John Brownlow

Hak cihâna tolıdur kimseler Hakk’ı bilmez / Anı sen senden iste o senden ayru olmaz.

Yunus Emre

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fallFrightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.

William Stafford

Every evening words, not stars, light the sky. No rest in life like life itself.

Umberto Saba

...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

Poetry must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

...always-the sharp,plaintive edgeon the rimof the spoonof my giving.(lines 8-13 of the poem 'Confessions')

Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

. . . On a sandbarsunlight stretches out its limbs, or is ita sycamore, so brazen, so clean and bold?

William Stafford

I like the imp / in impossibility

Pierre Joris

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Poetry Quotes - Page 74

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