Poetry Quotes - Page 79

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

i have had my ups and downsbut wotthehell wotthehellyesterday sceptres and crownsfried oysters and velvet gownsand today i herd with bumsbut wotthehell wotthehelli wake the world from sleepas i caper and sing and leapwhen i sing my wild free tunewotthehell wotthehellunder the blear eyed mooni am pelted with cast off shoonbut wotthehell wotthehell

Don Marquis

Sharing one umbrella,We have to hold each other,Round the waist to keep together,You ask me why I'm smiling-It's because I'm thinking,I want it to rain forever.

Vicki Feaver

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

The fear of poetry is an indication that we are cut off from our own reality.

Muriel Rukeyser

They mutilate they torment each otherwith silences with wordsas if they had anotherlife to livethey do soas if they had forgottenthat their bodiesare inclined to deaththat the insides of men easily break downruthless with each otherthey are weakerthan plants and animalsthey can be killed by a wordby a smile by a look

Tadeusz Różewicz

How could poetry and literature have arisen from something as plebian as the cuneiform equivalent of grocery-store bar codes? I prefer the version in which Prometheus brought writing to man from the gods. But then I remind myself that…we should not be too fastidious about where great ideas come from. Ultimately, they all come from a wrinkled organ that at its healthiest has the color and consistency of toothpaste, and in the end only withers and dies.

Alice W. Flaherty

There will never be an endTo this droning of the surf.

Wallace Stevens

Thirsty for being, the poet ceaselessly reaches out to reality, seeking with the indefatigable harpoon of the poem a reality that is always better hidden, more re(g)al. The poem’s power is as an instrument of possession but at the same time, ineffably, it expresses the desire for possession, like a net that fishes by itself, a hook that is also the desire of the fish. To be a poet is to desire and, at the same time, to obtain, in the exact shape of the desire.

Julio Cortázar

I am she who lifts the mountainsWhen she goes to hunt,Who wears mamba for a headbandAnd a lion for a belt.Beware!I swallow elephants wholeAnd pick my teeth with rhinoceros horns,I drink up rivers to get at the hippos.Let them hear my words!Nhamo is comingAnd her hunger is great.I am she who tosses treesInstead of spears.The ostrich is my pillowAnd the elephant is my footstool!I am NhamoWho makes the river my highwayAnd sends crocodiles scurrying into the reeds!

Nancy Farmer

When people say, "I've told you fifty times," / They mean to scold, and very often do; / When poets say, "I've written fifty rhymes," / They make you dread that they 'II recite them too;In gangs of fifty, thieves commit their crimes; / At fifty love for love is rare, 't is true, / But then, no doubt, it equally as true is, / A good deal may be bought for fifty Louis.

George Gordon Byron

Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

At the round earth's imagined corners blowYour trumpets, angels, and arise, ariseFrom death, you numberless infinitiesOf souls, and to your scattered bodies go ;All whom the flood did, and fire shall o'erthrow,All whom war, dea[r]th, age, agues, tyrannies,Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you, whose eyesShall behold God, and never taste death's woe.But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space ;For, if above all these my sins abound,'Tis late to ask abundance of Thy grace,When we are there. Here on this lowly ground,Teach me how to repent, for that's as goodAs if Thou hadst seal'd my pardon with Thy blood.

John Donne

Everything has its poetry. 94

Joseph Joubert

This dream the world is having about itselfincludes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail,a groove in the grass my father showed us allone day while meadowlarks were trying to tellsomething better about to happen.

William Stafford

Bring to me, it said, continual proof / you've been alive.

Stephen Dunn

Talent is a faucet. When it is on, one must write. Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance.

Jean Anouilh

If I'm still wistful about On the Road, I look on the rest of the Kerouac oeuvre--the poems, the poems!--in horror. Read Satori in Paris lately? But if I had never read Jack Kerouac's horrendous poems, I never would have had the guts to write horrendous poems myself. I never would have signed up for Mrs. Safford's poetry class the spring of junior year, which led me to poetry readings, which introduced me to bad red wine, and after that it's all just one big blurry condemned path to journalism and San Francisco.

Sarah Vowell

If words allow themselves to be handled, it is with the help of infinite carefulness. One has to welcome them, listen to the, before asking any service of them. Words are living things closely involved with human life.

Paul Nougé

I said: 'A line will take us hours maybe;Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

W.B. Yeats

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.

Robert Penn Warren

Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.

Ben Lerner

Landscape is my religion....God in a green legend, I lean over the poolIn a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branchesAnd floored with a skin of water.

Norman MacCaig

THIS IS WHYHe will never be given to wonder muchif he was the mouth for some cruel forcethat said it. But if he were(this will comfort her) less than one momentout of millions had he meant it. So many years and so many turnsthey had swerved around the subject.And he will swear for many morethe kitchen and everything in it vanished --the oak table, their guests, the refrigerator doorhe had been surely propped against--all changed to rusted ironwork and ashexcept in the center in her linen caftan:she was not touched.He remembers the silence before he spokeand her nodding a little,as if in the meat of this gray wastehere was the signalfor him to speak what they had long agreed,what somewhere they had prepared together.And this one moment in the desert of ashstretches into forever.They had been having a dinner party.She had been lonely. A friend asked her almost jokingif she had ever felt really crazy,and when she started to unwind her answerin long, lovely sentences like scarves within herhe saw this was the waythey could no longer talk together.And that is when he said it,in front of the guests,because he couldn't bear to hear her.And this is why the guests have leftand she screams as he comes near her.

Michael Ryan

Prison MoonFour a.m. work duty and I beginmy solitary trudge from outer compoundto main building. A shivering guard,chilled in his lonely outpost, strip searchesme until content that my inconsequential nudity.poses no threat and then whispersthe secret code that allows me admittance into the open quarter-mile walkway.I chuff my way into another dayas ice glints on the razor wireand the rifles note my numbed passage,silent but for my huffs and scuffleon the cracked, slippery sidewalk A new moon, veiled in wispy fogand beringed in glory, hangs over the prison, its gaudy glow taunting the halogen spotlights.The moon’s creamy pull upsetssome liquid equilibrium within meand like tides, wolves and all manner of madmen, I surrender disturbed by the certainty that under the bony luminescence of a grinning moon The lunar deliriums grip meand I howl--once, then again, andsurely somewhere an unbound sleeper stirs, penitence is dying a giddy death.I shake myself saneand as the echoes hangin the frigid air I explainto the wild-eyed guard that convicts, like all animals under the leash,must bay at the beauty beyond them.

Jorge Antonio Renaud

the poet I saw once...but whose words have long beenin my mind, windows of invincible candles...

Nathalie Handal

Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is ferocious, life, but it must eat . . .

Lucia Perillo

My art unkind, my energy all gone blind;The limbs uneven, the face shallower,Because those who I see are not seen,Those who see me are rude indeed. So blow, blow dear winter, just blow along me!

Santosh Kalwar

It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.

James Fenton

L'aube exalteé ainsi qu'un peuple de colombes, et j'ai vu quelquefois ce que l'homme a cru voir!(And dawn, exalted like a host of doves - and then I've seen what men believe they've seen!)

Arthur Rimbaud

How are poets able to unzip what they see around them, calling forth a truer essence from behind a common fact? Why, reading a verse about a pear, do you see past the fruit in so transcendent a way?

Elizabeth Berg

We are spirits clad in veils.

Christopher Pearse Cranch

I was compared to Charles Bukowski yesterday. It was the best and worst compliment I've ever gotten.

Rosa Sophia

One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.

Stephen Dobyns

Each and every words count.Each and every thoughts count.

Santosh Kalwar

With slouch and swing around the ringWe trod the Fools’ Parade!We did not care: we knew we wereThe Devils’ Own Brigade:And shaven head and feet of leadMake a merry masquerade.

Oscar Wilde

Living is the opposite of poetry. Poetry is the recollection of living, or, more often than not, the lament of having not lived. Or worse yet, merely the contemplation of living. My advice to you, Ms. Harper, is this: Live. And keep living. And never stop to look back to write about what you have lived and observed and overcome, lest you turn into a pillar of salt. This desert life is already full of such monoliths.

P.S. Baber

And when I stand in the receiving linelike Jackie Kennedywithout the pillbox hat,if Jackie were fat and had taken enough Klonopinto still an ox,and you whisperI think of youdon't finish withbecause I've been going to Weight Watcherson Tuesdays and wonder

Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

The answer to our existence lies in existence itself.

Santosh Kalwar

He was weary of himself, of cold ideas and brain dreams. Life a poem? Not when you went about forever poetizing about your own life instead of living it. How innocuous it all was, and empty, empty, empty! This chasing after yourself, craftily observing your own tracks--in a circle, of course.This sham diving into the stream of life while all the time you sat angling after yourself, fishing yourself up in one curious disguise or another! If he could only be overwhelmed by something--life, love, passion--so that he could no longer shape it into poems, but had to let it shape him!

Jens Peter Jacobsen

The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person...

Czesław Miłosz

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.

John Cage

Flow gently, sweet Afton,amang thy green braes,Flow gently, I'll sing theea song in thy praise;My Mary's asleepby thy murmuring stream,Flow gently, sweet Afton,disturb not her dream.Thou stock dove whose echoresounds thro' the glen,Ye wild whistly blackbirdsin yon thorny den,Thou green crested lapwingthy screaming forbear,I charge you, disturb notmy slumbering fair.How lofty, sweet Afton,thy neighboring hills,Far mark'd with the coursesof clear winding rills;There daily I wanderas noon rises high,My flocks and my Mary'ssweet cot in my eye.How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below, Where, wild in the woodlands,the primroses blow;There oft, as mild eveningweeps over the lea,The sweet-scented birk shadesmy Mary and me.Thy crystal stream, Afton,how lovely it glides,And winds by the cot wheremy Mary resides;How wanton thy watersher snowy feet lave,As, gathering sweet flowerets,she stems thy clear wave.Flow gently, sweet Afton,amang thy green braes,Flow gently, sweet river,the theme of my lays; My Mary's asleepby thy murmuring stream,Flow gently, sweet Afton,disturb not her dreams.

Robert Burns

For the beginning is assuredlythe end- since we know nothing, pureand simple, beyondour own complexities.

William Carlos Williams

If rape or arson, poison or the knifeHas wove no pleasing patterns in the stuffOf this drab canvas we accept as life -It is because we are not bold enough!

Charles Baudelaire

I heard a bird congratulating itselfall day for being a jay.Nobody cared. But it was gladall over again, and said so, again.

William Stafford

Poetry is an orphan of silence.

Charles Simic

And so I pray I am today as honestwith myself, with life all around me and below and above me,with all who I encounter.

Jimmy Santiago Baca

... unfools of unbeing ... means quite clearly people who are too stereotyped to be eccentric – people who are too dead spiritually to exist at all and who call alive individual fools

Norman Friedman

Mon Dieu, la vie est par trop moche.

Aldous Huxley

If we knew how to find the lost, we would know how to rediscover the parts of our mindsleft behindin battle.

Margarita Engle

I can speak of you now to anyone because I’ve stopped wanting anything like what I once wanted from you.

Carol Guess

...the collective wisdom of humanity [is] enshrined in its poetry.

Robyn Donald

bad breath and butt smell; that is prison, in a nutshell.

Raegan Butcher

I am not obsessing.I am just sitting hereperforating this post-itwith a push-pin.

Ada Limon

Live for everything, or die for nothing

Nate Spears

The secret to life is to live as though you know the secret." Barbara Botch

Barbara Botch

breathe in experience breathe out poetry

Muriel Rukeyser

Where to start?Everything cracks and shakes,The air trembles with similes,No one world's better than another;the earth moans with metaphors.

Osip Mandelstam

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Poetry Quotes - Page 79

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