Poetry Quotes - Page 83

Love's language is imprecise,fits more like mittens than gloves.

holding a tiny dixie cup in my hand makes me feel like a giant human being that can crush things

I have defined poetry as a 'passionate pursuit of the Real.

And this gray spirit yearning in desireTo follow knowledge like a sinking star,Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

Alfred Tennyson

I searched for my own heartand long after I had lost my wayin the days trailing past with their foliagein the aloof sky blue with distanceI thought I'd find my heartwhere I'd kept your eyes two brown butterfliesand I saw the swallows swoopand shadows starlings

Ingrid Jonker

Here is Menard's own intimate forest: 'Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade...I live in great density...Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage...In the forest, I am my entire self. Everything is possible in my heart just as it is in the hiding places in ravines. Thickly wooded distance separates me from moral codes and cities.

Gaston Bachelard

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--Not in lone splendour hung aloft the nightAnd watching, with eternal lids apart,Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite.

John Keats

All war is based in deception (cfr. Sun Tzu, “The Art of War”).Definition of deception: “The practice of deliberately making somebody believe things that are not true. An act, a trick or device entended to deceive somebody”.Thus, all war is based in metaphor.All war necessarily perfects itself in poetry.Poetry (since indefinable) is the sense of seduction.Therefore, all war is the storytelling of seduction, and seduction is the nature of war.

Pola Oloixarac

The poets are supposed to liberate the words – not chain them in phrases. Who told the poets they were supposed to think? Poets are meant to sing and to make words sing. Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? 'Your very own words,' indeed! And who are you?

Brion Gysin

There's a book of poetryin the lines of my handsthat no one wants to read

Holly Schindler

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.

Edgar Allan Poe

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of man and in Praise of God, and I'd be a damn fool if they weren't.

Dylan Thomas

The campus, an academy of trees,under which some hand, the wind's I guess,had scattered the pale lightof thousands of spring beauties,petals stained with pink veins;secret, blooming for themselves.We sat among them.Your long fingers, thin body,and long bones of improbable genius;some scattered gene as Kafka must have had.Your deep voice, this passing dust of miracles.That simple that was myself, half conscious,as though each moment was a pagewhere words appeared; the bent hammer of the typestruck against the moving ribbon.The light air, the restless leaves;the ripple of time warped by our longing.There, as if we were paintedby some unknown impressionist.

Ruth Stone

Un día habré dormido con un sueño tan largo que ni tus besos puedan avivar el letargo. Un día estaré sola, como está la montaña entre el largo desierto y la mar que la baña.

Alfonsina Storni

. . .because we had survivedsisters and brothers, daughters and sons,we discovered bones that rosefrom the dark earth and sangas white birds in the treesBecause the story of our lifebecomes our lifeBecause each of us tells the same storybut tells it differentlyand none of us tells it the same way twice . . (from, Why We Tell Stories)

Lisel Mueller

Base words are uttered only by the baseAnd can for such at once be understood;But noble platitudes — ah, there's a caseWhere the most careful scrutiny is neededTo tell a voice that's genuinely goodFrom one that's base but merely has succeeded.

W.H. Auden

Her belly ruptures full of parasites, Her eyes sink back in her skull Her butchered wrists, dangle From the edge of the bathtubHer children cuddle against her Desperate for love she cannot give

Wrath James White

we want it visibletto showwhen even the most tvisible joyttwill reveal itselfonly when we havetttransformed it within.there’s nowhere, my love, the world can existexpect within.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I’ve been here before, dreaming myselfbackwards, among grappling hooks of light.True to the seasons, I’ve lived every wordspoken. Did I walk into someone’s nightmare?

Yusef Komunyakaa

In this universe there are no time machines or keys that can turn hearts back around.

Sarah Tregay

I could not have climbed any mountains while looking from the ground... I would not have flown... or dived... or surfed... or swum... I am not a tourist nor a spectator... this is the life I have left, and I will not waste it like some rubber-neck

Kem

I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.

Philip Larkin

How can the bird that is born for joySit in a cage and sing?How can a child, when fears annoy,But droop his tender wing,And forget his youthful spring?

William Blake

Again I see you, But me I don't see!, The magical mirror in which I saw myself has been broken, And only a piece of me I see in each fatal fragment - Only a piece of you and me!...

Fernando Pessoa

The muffled syllables that Nature speaksFill us with deeper longing for her word; She hides a meaning that the spirit seeks,She makes a sweeter music than is heard.

George Santayana

This is where I belong, burning in these flames. For everything I have done wrong, I know I am to blame.

Atarah L. Poling

I went down not long agoto the Mad River, under the willowsI knelt and drank from that crumpled flow, call itwhat madness you will, there's a sicknessworse than the risk of death and that'sforgetting what we should never forget.Tecumseh lived here.The wounds of the pastare ignored, but hang onlike the litter that snags among the yellow branches,newspapers and plastic bags, after the rains.Where are the Shawnee now?Do you know? Or would you have to write to Washington, and even then,whatever they said,would you believe it? SometimesI would like to paint my body red and go intothe glittering snowto die.His name meant Shooting Star.From Mad River country north to the borderhe gathered the tribesand armed them one more time. He vowedto keep Ohio and it took himover twenty years to fail.After the bloody and final fighting, at Thames,it was over, excepthis body could not be found,and you can do whatever you want with that, sayhis people came in the black leaves of the nightand hauled him to a secret grave, or thathe turned into a little boy again, and leapedinto a birch canoe and wentrowing home down the rivers. Anywaythis much I'm sure of: if we meet him, we'll know it,he will still beso angry.

Mary Oliver

The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through …

John Ashbery

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

Robert Penn Warren

Every particle of dust on a patch of earthWas a sun-cheek or brow of the morning star;Shake the dust off your sleeve carefully--That too was a delicate, fair face.

Omar Khayyám

In an old family albumEver again you return, Melancholy,O meekness of the solitary soul.A golden day glows and expires.Humbly the patient man surrenders to painRinging with melodious sound and soft madness.Look! There's the twilight.Night returns once more and a mortal thing lamentsAnd another suffers in sympathy.Shuddering under autumn starsYearly the head is bowed deeper.-Georg Trakl (1887-1914)

Georg Trakl

I began a poem in lines of one syllable. It's rather difficult, but the merit of all things lies in their difficulty. The subject matter is gallant. I'll read you the first canto; it's four hundred verses long and takes one minute.

Alexandre Dumas

I wanted to write some words you'd remember.Words so alert they'd leap from the paper,crawl up your shoulder, lie by your ears,and purr themselves to you like baby kittens,but it was rainy, so I laid there and daydreamed about you.

C.L. Foster

When When it’s over, it’s over, and we don’t know any of us, what happens then.So I try not to miss anything.I think, in my whole life, I have never missed The full moonor the slipper of its coming back.Or, a kiss.Well, yes, especially a kiss.

Mary Oliver

Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.

Charles Bukowski

Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni de dónde, te amo directamente sin problemas ni orgullo: así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera, sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres, tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía, tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño.

Pablo Neruda

To pray you open your whole selfTo sky, to earth, to sun, to moonTo one whole voice that is youAnd know there is moreThat you can't see, can't hearCan't know except in momentsSteadly growing, and in languagesThat aren't always sound but otherCircles of motion.Like eagle that Sunday morningOver Salt River. Circled in blue skyIn wind, swept our hearts cleanWith sacred wings.We see you, see ourselves and knowThat we must take the utmost careAnd kindness in all things.Breathe in, knowing we are made ofAll this, and breathe, knowingWe are truly blessed because weWere born, and die soon within aTrue circle of motion,Like eagle rounding out the morningInside us.We pray that it will be doneIn beauty.In beauty.

Joy Harjo

The first kiss and the first glass of wine are the best.

Marty Rubin

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation.", The Nation, October 7, 1996)

Adrienne Rich

where some god pissed a rain of reason to make things grow only to die,

Charles Bukowski

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

Siri Hustvedt

Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may last!

Percy Bysshe Shelley

At first first nothing will happen to usand later on it will happen to us again.

Leonard Cohen

So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan which movesTo that mysterious realm where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,Scourged to his dungeon; but, sustain'd and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams."Thanatopsis

William Cullen Bryant

DogfishI wantedThe past to go away, I wantedTo leave it, like another country; I wantedMy life to close, and openLike a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song Where it fallsDown over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted To hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,Whoever I was, I wasAliveFor a little while.…mostly, I want to be kind.And nobody, of course, is kind,Or mean,For a simple reason.And nobody gets out of it, having to Swim through the fires to stay inThis world.

Mary Oliver

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winterthat only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

Rainer Maria Rilke

You are not worthless. Even if you've been called that your entire life.

Kevin Walker

Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.

Henry Beston

as some strings, untouched,sound when no one is speaking.So it was when love slipped inside us.

Jane Hirshfield

The business of love is cruelty which,by our wills, we transform to live together.

William Carlos Williams

I had a dove and the sweet dove died; And I have thought it died of grieving: O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied, With a silken thread of my own hand's weaving.

John Keats

Slogans are mere wordsuck...

Gabriel Thy

O, how this spring of love resemblethThe uncertain glory of an April day,Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,And by and by a cloud takes all away!

William Shakespeare

If Springtime crawls out of thewild mouths of flowers, thensurely, Winter crawls out of mine.

Cecilia Llompart

‎I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, jar of octopus, cuckoo's cry, 5-7-5, but now I want a russian novel, a 50-page description of you sleeping, another 75 of what you think staring at your window.

Dean Young

How they had dreamed together, he and she... how they had planned, and laughed, and loved. They had lived for a while in the very heart of poetry.

Elizabeth von Arnim

She's always looking for poetry and passion and sensitivity, the whole Romantic kitchen. I live on a rather simpler diet.' 'Prose and pudding?''I don't expect attractive men necessarily to have attractive souls.

John Fowles

Some who grow dull religious straight commenceAnd gain in morals what they lose in sense.

Alexander Pope

How blest am I in this discovering thee!To enter in these bonds is to be free;Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be. Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee,As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be

John Donne

And then I feel the sun itselfas it blazes over the hills,like a million flowers on fire --clearly I'm not needed,yet I feel myself turninginto something of inexplicable value.-from The Buddha's Last Instruction

Mary Oliver

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Poetry Quotes - Page 83

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