Poetry Quotes - Page 88

How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do""Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.

Dorothy L. Sayers

Be there a picnic for the devil,an orgy for the satyr,and a wedding for the bride.

Roman Payne

Las lágrimas que no se lloranesperan en pequeños lagos?O serán ríos invisiblesque corren hacia la tristeza?

Pablo Neruda

July 4th fireworks exhale over the Hudson sadly.It is beautiful that they have to disappear.It's like the time you said I love you madly.That was an hour ago. It's been a fervent year.

Frederick Seidel

Spilling a Secret What its size, will have varying consequences. It’s not possible to predict what will happen if you open the gunnysack, let the cat escape. A liberated feline might purr on your lap, or it might scratch your eyes out. You can’t tell until you loosen the knot. Do you chance losing a friendship, if that friend’s well-being will only be preserved by betraying sworn-to silence trust? Once the seam is ripped, can it be mended again? And if that proves impossible, will you be okay when it all falls to pieces?

Ellen Hopkins

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute.

Tom Schulman

Cuando vayamos al maryo te diré mi secreto:Me envuelve, pero no es ola...Me amarga..., pero no es sal...

Dulce María Loynaz

...they come to us, these restless dead,Shrouds woven from the words of men,With trumpets sounding overhead(The walls of hope have grown so thinAnd all our vaunted innocenceHas withered in this endless frost)That promise little recompenseFor all we risk, for all we've lost...

Mira Grant

But drunkenly, or secretly, we swore,Disciples of that astigmatic saint,That we would never leave the islandUntil we had put down, in paint, in words,As palmists learn the network of a hand,All of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines,Every neglected, self-pitying inletMuttering in brackish dialect, the ropes of mangrovesFrom which old soldier crabs slippedSurrendering to slush,Each ochre track seeking some hilltop andLosing itself in an unfinished phrase,Under sand shipyards where the burnt-out palmsInverted the design of unrigged schooners,Entering forests, boiling with life,Goyave, corrosol, bois-canot, sapotille.Days!The sun drumming, drumming,Past the defeated pennons of the palms,Roads limp from sunstroke,Past green flutes of the grassThe ocean cannonading, come!Wonder that opened like the fanOf the dividing frondsOn some noon-struck sahara,Where my heart from its rib cage yelped like a pupAfter clouds of sanderlings rustily wheelingThe world on its ancient,Invisible axis,The breakers slow-dolphining over more breakers,To swivel our easels down, as firmAs conquerors who had discovered home.

Derek Walcott

I can’t help but notice that you keep writing love poetry to my wife. Well, you see, I married her, which makes her my wife. You know what you might want to try? Writing some poems about the sunset. The sunset isn’t fucking married.

A.J. Jacobs

From the union of power and money,from the union of power and secrecy,from the union of government and science,from the union of government and art,from the union of science and money,from the union of ambition and ignorance,from the union of genius and war,from the union of outer space and inner vacuity,the Mad Farmer walks quietly away.

Wendell Berry

This dewdrop world Is but a dewdrop worldAnd yet —

Kobayashi Issa

This is newness: every little tawdryObstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only youDon't know what to make of the sudden slippiness,The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant.There's no getting up it by the words you know.No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe.We have only come to look. You are too newTo want the world in a glass hat.

Sylvia Plath

literature will lose, sunlight will win, don't worry.

Franz Wright

No truer word, save God's, was ever spoken,Than that the largest heart is soonest broken.

Walter Savage Landor

When a woman's face is wrinkledAnd her hairs are sprinkled, With gray, Lackaday!Aside she's cast, No one respect will pay;Remember, Lasses, remember.And while the sun shines make hay:You must not expect in December, The flowers you gathered in May.

Ann Rinaldi

And the Hippos were boiled in their tanks!

Jack Kerouac

depth and substance.the two most exquisite qualities. be it in a poemor a person.

Sanober Khan

For it is up to you and meto take solacein nostalgia's armsand our abilityto create the everlastingfrom fleeting moments.

Sanober Khan

I rhymeTo see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Seamus Heaney

love wounds me with soft pillows with tender lips and fingers

Sanober Khan

I can't even make up a rhyme about an umbrella, let alone death and life and eternal peace.

Knut Hamsun

THERE is something in the autumn that is native to my blood—t Touch of manner, hint of mood;t And my heart is like a rhyme,t With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.

Bliss Carman

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.

Jane Hirshfield

There is also a third kind of madness, which is possession by the Muses, enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric....But he, who, not being inspired and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of art--he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman.

Plato

Four billion people on this earthbut my imagination is still the same.It's bad with large numbers.It's still taken by particularity.It flits in the dark like a flashlight,illuminating only random faceswhile all the rest go by,never coming to mind and never really missed.

Wisława Szymborska

I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends.

Richard M. Rorty

it's so easy to be a poetand so hard to be a man.

Charles Bukowski

In scientific thinking are always present elements of poetry. Science and music requires a thought homogeneous.

Albert Einstein

We walked through night until there was a poem.

Brenda Hillman

Honest criticism and sensible appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.

T.S Eliot

On Waterloo Bridge where we said our goodbyes,the weather conditions bring tears to my eyes.I wipe them away with a black woolly gloveAnd try not to notice I've fallen in loveOn Waterloo Bridge I am trying to think:This is nothing. you're high on the charm and the drink.But the juke-box inside me is playing a songThat says something different. And when was it wrong?On Waterloo Bridge with the wind in my hairI am tempted to skip. You're a fool. I don't care.the head does its best but the heart is the boss-I admit it before I am halfway across

Wendy Cope

In pale moonlight / the wisteria's scent / comes from far away.

Yosa Buson

Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.

Kim Addonizio

Two girls discover the secret of lifein a sudden line of poetry.

Denise Levertov

One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other.

Charles Simic

I played God todayAnd it was fun!I made animals that men had never seenSo they would stop and scratch their headsInstead of scowling.I made words that men had never heardSo they would stop and stare at meInstead of running.And I made love that laughedSo men would giggle like childrenInstead of sighing.Tomorrow, perhaps, I won't be GodAnd you will know itBecause you won't see any three-headed catsOr bushes with bells on...I wish I could always play GodSo that lonely men could laugh!

James Kavanaugh

Little world, full of scars and gashes, ripened with another's pain,Your flowers feed on carrion--so do your birds;Men feed on each other because you taught them life was cheap,Flowing from your endless womb without pain or understanding.No midwife caresses your flesh or bathes clean your progeny,Life spurts from you, little world,and you regard it with disdain.Only bruised men sense your cruelty, men whose life has lost its meaning.

James Kavanaugh

Shall I compare thee to a barrel of apples?Though art more hairy, but sweeter inside.Rough winds couldn't keep me from taking you to chapel,Where finally a horse could take a bride...

Cynthia Hand

You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson. Like that there are two sexes.

David Markson

In the boundaryless forests, there’re dancers of nude.Yet in the confines of pasture, there’s promise of food.On which is your side?Ô, but tarry and bide,ere you decide,in both do confide.

Roman Payne

For all the ghosts and corpses that shall never know the breath of our childrenso longfor the sacrifice and endurance of our mothers and the sustained breath of our fatherswe live

Saul Williams

Pleasured equallyIn seeking as in finding,Each detail minding,Old Walt went seekingAnd finding.

Langston Hughes

The Poem That Took The Place Of A MountainThere it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table. It reminded him how he had needed A place to go to in his own direction How he had recomposed the pines, Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds For the outlook that would be right, Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion: The exact rock where his inexactness Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged Where he could lie and gazing down at the sea, Recognize his unique and solitary home.

Wallace Stevens

Oh, friend, forget not, when you fain would noteIn me a beauty that was never mine,How first you knew me in a book I wrote,How first you loved me for a written line....

Edna St. Vincent Millay

My Muse sits forlornShe wishes she had not been bornShe sits in the coldNo word she says is ever told.

Stevie Smith

Come to the beach with meAnd watch the pelicans die,Hear their feeble screamsCalling to an empty skyWhere once they playedAnd scouted for food,Not scavenging like the gullsBut plummeting unafraidInto friendly waters.Come to the beach with meAnd watch the pelicans die,Listen to their feeble screamsCalling to an empty sky.Maybe Christ will walk byAnd save them in their final toilOr work a miracle from the shore,A courtesy of Union Oil.Come to the beach with meAnd watch the pelicans die.My God! They'll never fly again.It's worse than Normandy somehow,For there we only murdered men.

James Kavanaugh

It was language I loved, not meaning. I liked poetry better when I wasn't sure what it meant. Eliot has said that the meaning of the poem is provided to keep the mind busy while the poem gets on with its work -- like the bone thrown to the dog by the robber so he can get on with his work. . . . Is beauty a reminder of something we once knew, with poetry one of its vehicles? Does it give us a brief vision of that 'rarely glimpsed bright face behind/ the apparency of things'? Here, I suppose, we ought to try the impossible task of defining poetry. No one definition will do. But I must admit to a liking for the words of Thomas Fuller, who said: 'Poetry is a dangerous honey. I advise thee only to taste it with the Tip of thy finger and not to live upon it. If thou do'st, it will disorder thy Head and give thee dangerous Vertigos.

P.K. Page

Poem (the spirit likes to dress up) The spirit likes to dress up like this: ten fingers, ten toes,shoulders, and all the rest at night in the black branches, in the morningin the blue branches of the world. It could float, of course, but would ratherplumb rough matter. Airy and shapeless thing, it needs the metaphor of the body,lime and appetite, the oceanic fluids; it needs the body’s world, instinctand imagination and the dark hug of time, sweetness and tangibility,to be understood, to be more than pure light that burns where no one is –so it enters us – in the morning shines from brute comfort like a stitch of lightning;and at night lights up the deep and wondrous drownings of the body like a star.

Mary Oliver

My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.The vein in my neckadores you. A swordstands up between my hips,my hidden fleece sends forth its scent of human oil.

Li-Young Lee

A wealth you cannot imagineflows through you.Do not consider what strangers say.Be secluded in your secret heart-house,that bowl of silence.

Jalaluddin Rumi

Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.Let me keep company always with those who say "Look!" and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.

Mary Oliver

Without poets, without artists... everything would fall apart into chaos. There would be no more seasons, no more civilizations, no more thought, no more humanity, no more life even; and impotent darkness would reign forever. Poets and artists together determine the features of their age, and the future meekly conforms to their edit.

Guillaume Apollinaire

In the great green room, there was a telephoneAnd a red balloonAnd a picture of a cat jumping over the moon...

Margaret Wise Brown

Men had always been the reciters of poetry in the desert.

Michael Ondaatje

These wrinkles are nothingThese gray hairs are nothing,This stomach which sagswith old food, these bruisedand swollen ankles, my darkening brain,they are nothing.I am the same boymy mother used to kiss.

Mark Strand

THOUGH you are in your shining days,Voices among the crowdAnd new friends busy with your praise,Be not unkind or proud,But think about old friends the most:Time's bitter flood will rise,Your beauty perish and be lostFor all eyes but these eyes.

W.B. Yeats

For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.

Adrienne Rich

If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.

Walker Percy

Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There will always be something left to know, something to excite the imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which they live (p. 64)

Robert Frost

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Poetry Quotes - Page 88

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