A Poetry Quotes

Looking back on my life, I'd say I am grateful to my two sons for having brought me up. It could not have been easy - for them or for their father. For me it was a "Poetry Workshop," a way of doing poetry by another means (in no sense a continuation of Iowa) - as well as the sort of upbringing I never got from my mother.

As luck would have it, I had a poet, a classical poet, for a mother. She didn't write free verse; she wrote poetry until the last years of her life in the classical Chinese style. So a lot of work was done for me - when you imbibe Tang and Sung poets with a mother who chanted verses on the balcony in the moonlight. ~ Wong May

I just think that the world of workshops - I've written a poem that is a parody of workshop talk, I've written a poem that is a kind of parody of a garrulous poet at a poetry reading who spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the poem before reading it, I've written a number of satirical poems about other poets. ~ Billy Collins

You will find meaning in life
only if you create it.It is a poetry to be composed.
It is a song to be sung.It is a dance to be danced ... ~ Osho

His is a poetry devoid of any poetry. ~ Pietros Maneos

Your life is a poetry, it just needs some interpretation. ~ Debasish Mridha

If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul. ~ Roger McGough

That is what is marvelous about school, she realized: when you are in school, your talents are without number, and your promise is boundless. You ace a math test: you will one day work for NASA. The choir director asks you to sing a solo at the holiday concert: you are the next Mariah Carey. You score a goal, you win a poetry contest, you act in a play. And you are everything at once: actor, astronomer, gymnast, star. But at a certain point, you begin to feel your talents dropping away, like feathers from a molting bird. Cello lessons conflict with soccer practice. There aren't enough spots on the debating team. Calculus remains elusive. Until the day you realize that you cannot think of a single thing you are wonderful at. ~ Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

The advice I continually give to young writers is this, "Learn to paint pictures with words." Not just once upon a time, but ... In the long secret dust of ages, beneath a blue forgotten sky, where trade winds caress the sun bleached shores of unknown realms ... See, as much as there are words in poetry, there is a poetry in words. Use it, stay faithful to the path you have set your heart upon and follow it. ~ Brian Jacques

Perfume is a story in odors, sometimes a poetry of memory ~ Jean-Claude Ellena

I would ask the people who were generous toward my own work. After class one day a poetry professor said to me, "Hey, there's this guy Basho you would find interesting," and so I found Basho. A fiction teacher told me, "You ought to read Clarice Lispector if you're interested in that sort of in-between stuff," and then Lispector appeared. It's not magic. You just keep your eyes open. ~ John D'Agata

There's nothing worse in the world than a poetry recital. ~ Charles Bukowski

With a poetry book I can send 100 copies out to reviewers and other people, and even do it in advance and get their response. It's difficult with iPad: how do you send it out for free, and how do you even disseminate it before it goes into their store? ~ Felix Dennis

Surrealism is not a poetry but a poetics, and even more, and more decisively, a world vision. ~ Octavio Paz

A group of us started a community center in Santa Monica. We've tried different programs, and three have worked really well. A poetry group. Once a week we visit Venice High and talk to girls at risk. ~ Lisa Bonet

I sure do like this sculpture."
Jolene smiled at the newcomer. "Well, hello, Lou."
The Devil sent her a narrow-eyed look. "Hello, vile woman."
"You buttoned up your shirt wrong," Jolene told him.
"What?" he squeaked, peeking down at the shirt. Realizing she was kidding, he flattened his lips. "See, vile."
Jolene rolled her eyes. "Let it go, Lou."
Sensing there was more to this than the shirt comment, Harper asked, "Let what go? What did you do, Grams?"
Jolene tipped her chin at Lou. "He was in a bad mood, so thought I'd take him to a nice, calming atmosphere to cheer him up. Only there is no cheering him up."
Harper wasn't buying that innocent act for a single second. "Where did you take him?"
"To a poetry recital."
Lou's face hardened. "The words hardly ever rhymed! How is that poetry?" And it clearly drove his OCD streak crazy. ~ Suzanne Wright

Lord, decked with jewels, sitting at the head of a table. It is a poetry of assonance ~ Peter Ackroyd

Fossil bones and footsteps and ruined homes are the solid facts of history, but the surest hints, the most enduring signs, lie in those miniscule genes. For a moment we protect them with our lives, then like relay runners with a baton, we pass them on to be carried by our descendents. There is a poetry in genetics which is more difficult to discern in broken bomes, and genes are the only unbroken living thread that weaves back and forth through all those boneyards. ~ Jonathan Kingdon

Every day is a poetry day. ~ Naomi Shihab Nye

Poetry, from describing external events objectively, is becoming subjectified into a poetry of personal conscious expression. ~ Julian Jaynes

I don't have a poetry section in the bookshop.
(Don't have but should have, I have begun to think. The poetry, like everything else, is scattered thematically in a generally successful attempt to encourage punters to walk the circle, reading shelves which, if more conventionally arranged, they might feel happy to skip. But poetry - unlike fiction, biography, drama, history - continues to be generically in demand. It's not a question, as I used to assume, of no one reading poetry; more a matter of people who read poetry liking little else. They need a Section.) ~ Claudia Fitzherbert

For me, language and how I use it are very important. I held back on doing a poetry book, walking the fine line between trying to be helpful and just putting more junk out there. ~ Sakyong Mipham

Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Freud ... showed us that poetry is indigenous to the very constitution of the mind ; he saw the mind as being, in the greater part of its tendency, exactly a poetry-making faculty. ~ Lionel Trilling

Every flower has a poetry of love in her heart, every tree has a story of struggle in his mind. ~ Debasish Mridha

I'm basically a poetry scholar, and I'm happier here in my studio with my row of Chinese dictionaries than I am, frankly, at Lincoln Center. ~ Sam Hamill

OUR age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Your friends, and your associates, and the people around you, and the environment that you live in, and the speakers around you - the speakers around you - and the communicators around you, are the poetry makers.
If your mother tells you stories, she is a poetry maker.
If your father says stories, he is a poetry maker.
If your grandma tells you stories, she is a poetry maker.
And that's who forms our poetics. ~ Juan Felipe Herrera

I hope any poem I've ever written could stand on its own and not need to be a part of biography, critical theory or cultural studies. I don't want to give a poetry reading and have to provide the story behind the poem in order for it to make sense to an audience. I certainly don't want the poem to require a critical intermediary - a "spokescritic." I want my poems to be independently meaningful moments of power for a good reader. And that's the expectation I initially bring to other poets' writing. ~ Albert Goldbarth

People think of poetry as a school subject ... Poetry is very frustrating to students because they don't have a taste for ambiguity, for one thing. That gives them a poetry hangover. ~ Billy Collins

My life was a blank paper, until you came to rhyme with words & make it a poetry book. ~ Akansh Malik

...Eugene Sue's The Mysteries of Paris, a brilliant reenvisioning of one's own city as an exotic locale. Sue, who was too poor to travel, turned an awed gaze to the familiar and gave his readers a city they would recognize but which hid a poetry far from the familiar. ~ Andrei Codrescu

I'm a professional and I'll do anything - a poetry reading, television, cinema, anything that allows me to act. ~ Peter O'Toole

You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement. ~ Roberto Bolano

My life has had a lot of fits and starts: before I studied literature at all I was a musician, and began undergrad as a conservatory student. I started studying literature in my third year of college, when I took a poetry course with James Longenbach that was pretty extraordinary. It changed my life. ~ Garth Greenwell

I'm a poetry-skipper myself. I don't like to boast, but I have probably skipped more poetry than any other person of my age and weight in this country - make it any other two persons. This doesn't mean that I hate poetry. I don't feel that strongly about it. It only means that those who wish to communicate with me by means of the written word must do so in prose. ~ Will Cuppy

I have the idea that lyric poetry is a poetry that's driven by a sense of the presence of death. That there's something unbearable about the fact that we're going to die and that we can't stand it and I think you find that out in childhood and you don't really - at least I found it out in childhood and I found it hard to get over. ~ Edward Hirsch

Her flesh was powdery and voluptuously weary, as if tenderized by all the different beds and arms in which she had lain. Her face was as soft as the pulpy flash of an overripe banana, her breasts like two tiny bunches of grapes. She exuded a certain seedy charm, a poetry of premature corruption and decay. She breathed the air as if it burned her palate, baking her small, hot, whorish mouth. It was as if she were sucking a sweet or slurping champagne. ~ Dezso Kosztolanyi

I would say that American poetry has always been a poetry of personal testimony. ~ Mark Strand

I wait on my fix:
I am a poetry junkie. ~ Charles Bukowski

Think it's a poetry that comes out of the stuff of the poet's personal life, but he's trying to render this experience in more general and inclusive, or what used to be called universal, ~ David Shields

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost. ~ Gaston Bachelard

She's a poetry written by the hands of God . ~ Imran Shaikh

She's a poetry book.
You must read every letter,
and digest every word.
Every part of her paints
a part of a bigger picture.
You can't love her,
if you do not intend on
reading every page
and learning how to
comprehend every piece of her. ~ Pierre Alex Jeanty

I was actually a poetry major in college before I punted and decided to become a theater major. I wrote the poem that we put on the sauerkraut boxes in the style of Elling. ~ Denis O'Hare

The way you philosophize life, With those beer tins in your hand, Lady, such a poetry you are when you are drunk, And those cigarettes in between your pretty fingers, You look so very graceful when you are smoking, So very beautiful in the haze, Like some medieval artwork, So worthy to be on canvas…

I just love to watch you struggle in bed, Fighting the sunlight with your pillow, And in all the glory of your Sunday morning hangover, Innocence oozes out of your drunken face, And Oh my Godless lady it's time for your, Lemonades, Novocain and hour long shower in silence. I know it's crazy to believe in silly things, But you look so very pure when you suffer from your addictions…

--- Her Cigarettes And Beers ~ Piyush Rohankar

Love is the magic ink, which transform everyday life into a poetry. ~ Debasish Mridha

Friendship is a poetry of life that is written in two hearts. ~ Debasish Mridha

My first thought, as I followed Sean to that field behind the post office, was that he wanted a touch of this or that. And he did, really. But he also fancied himself a poetry lover. He would arrange us comfortably, then pull out a book and start to read. I would sit there on the plastic tarp, smoothing the plaid skirt of my uniform over my wool stockings, rather at a loss. How is a girl supposed to react to Keats? Does she gaze at the reader adoringly? Lie back seductively on one arm? ~ Katie Crouch

The world Existed on Lap of my 'MOM ~ Samar Sudha

True love ennobles and dignifies the material labors of life; and homely services rendered for love's sake have in them a poetry that is immortal. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

Summer in the trees! "It is time to strangle several bad poets." /
The yellow hobbyhorse rocks to and fro, and from the chimney / Drops the Strangler! The white and pink roses are slightly agitated by the struggle, / But afterwards beside the dead "poet" they cuddle up comfortingly against their vase. They are safer now, no one will compare them to the sea. /
Here on the railroad train, one more time, is the Strangler. / He is going to get that one there, who is on his way to a poetry reading. / Agh! Biff! A body falls to the moving floor. ~ Kenneth Koch

I entered a poem in a poetry contest around 1987, and the poem won and I received $1,000 for it. That made me realize that maybe what I was writing was worth reading to people. After that, for some reason, I turned to novels and I've written mainly novels ever since. ~ Sharon Creech

There were times when I was blown away by the virgin beauty of the land. Kind of like that guy who lost his shit on the internet at the full double rainbow across the sky. Remember that guy? He kept asking what it meant, and it is not so difficult a question to answer. It means that we are loved, like all living things that Gaia sustains. There is a poetry in the canapes of forests and in the gentle roll of hills. A song in the wind and a benediction in the kiss of the sun. There are stories in the chuckle of waters in creeks and epics told in the tides of oceans. There are trees, Granuaile, that seem sometimes like they have grown all their lives just to feel the touch of my hand upon their trunks. They are so welcoming to me. You will feel that welcome in your hands some day. You'll feel it in your toes as you walk upon the earth. I cannot wait to see that love bloom in your eyes....' Tears glistened at the edges of her eyes... She knew precisely what I meant. She understood. And she became almost unbearably beautiful to me in that moment. ~ Kevin Hearne

I want to write a play. I'd like to do an original musical. I should probably put together a poetry collection. ~ Neil Gaiman

Your life is a poetry with purpose. ~ Debasish Mridha

I'm not trying to impress you," he replied, glancing up at the front of the room. "Gads," he said, blinking in surprise. "What is that ?"
Hyacinth followed his gaze. Several of the Pleinsworth progeny, one of whom appeared to be costumed as a shepherdess, were milling about.
"Now that's an interesting coincidence," Gareth murmured.
"It might be time to start bleating," she agreed.
"I thought this was meant to be a poetry recitation."
Hyacinth grimaced and shook her head. "An unexpected change to the program, I'm afraid."
"From iambic pentameter to Little Bo Peep?" he asked doubtfully. "It does seem a stretch."
Hyacinth gave him a rueful look. "I think there will still be iambic pentameter."
His mouth fell open. "From Peep?"
She nodded, holding up the program that had been resting in her lap. "It's an original composition," she said, as if that would explain everything. "By Harriet Pleinsworth.The Shepherdess, the Unicorn, and Henry VIII ."
"All of them? At once?"
"I'm not jesting," she said, shaking her head.
"Of course not. Even you couldn't have made this up."
Hyacinth decided to take that as a compliment.
"Why didn't I receive one of these?" he asked, taking the program from her.
"I believe it was decided not to hand them out to the gentlemen," Hyacinth said, glancing about the room. "One has to admire Lady Pleinsworth's foresight, actually. You'd surely flee if you knew what was in store for you. ~ Julia Quinn

No one knows here, that the Death is actually, Actually to Born. ~ Samar Sudha

Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody. ~ Joshua Logan

There's a poetry to it, engineer's poetry ... it suggests Haverie - average, you know - certainly you have two lobes, don't you, symmetrical about the rocket's intended azimuth ... hauen, too-smashing someone with a hoe or a club ... off on a voyage of his own here, smiling at no one in particular, bringing in the popular wartime expression ab-hauen, quarterstaff technique, peasant humor, phallic comedy dating back to the ancient Greeks ... Slothrop's first impulse is to get back to what that Plas is into, but something about the man, despite obvious membership in the plot, keeps him listening ... an innocence, maybe a try at being friendly in the only way he has available, sharing what engages and runs him, a love for the Word. ~ Thomas Pynchon

I don't think there's any essential difference, at least for me, between writing poetry and writing prose. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

When anyone seriously pursues an art - painting, poetry, sculpture, composing - over twenty or thirty years, the sustained discipline carries the artist down to the countryside of grief, and that descent, resisted so long proves invigorating ... As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression. ~ Robert Bly

Who would not spout the family teapot in order to talk with Keats for an hour about poetry, or with Jane Austen about the art of fiction? ~ Virginia Woolf

The poet's first job of work is to put bread on the table. ~ Yvor Winters

Occasionally it is good for us to become small. ~ Nicole Gulotta

If you're afraid of the thorn, you truly don't deserve the rose. ~ Melody Lee

And what is the very essence of poetry if it is not this 'metaphorical language'-this marking of the before unapprehended relations of things? ~ Owen Barfield

Don't ignore anybody who has ignored everbody and everything for you. ~ Adis Ahmedi

Without pleasure there is no sight or measure. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

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 Nouge

sometimes when everything seems at
its worst
when all conspires
and gnaws
and the hours, days, weeks
years
seem wasted –
stretched there upon my bed
in the dark
looking upward at the ceiling
i get what many will consider an
obnoxious thought:
it's still nice to be
Bukowski. ~ Charles Bukowski

Kings are sad creatures. ~ Abū Al-ʿAlāʾ Al-Maʿarrī

For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out. ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

You must be drunk always. That is everything: the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time that crushes your shoulders and bends you earthward, you must be drunk without respite. But drunk on what? On wine, on poetry, on virtue - take your pick. But be drunk. ~ Charles Baudelaire

They will tell you home is safe zone.
No, bitch face is safe zone.
Bitch face is home.
Bitch face is cutting off the ladder,
willing to burn in the apartment,
if it means he can't get in. ~ Olivia Gatwood

You are the illness I will never cure. You are the poem I will never write. You are the thought I will never finish. You are the text I will never read. ~ Maria Elena

Autumn, whispering through the maples,
Pleaded: 'Die here with me! ~ Anna Akhmatova

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is ~ James Branch Cabell

We should hold each other more
while we are still alive, even if it hurts. ~ Robin Beth Schaer

In every scene I am waiting for you
To be with me in dreams ~ Dorothea Lasky

I know you and I were lovers since 1000000000000 years ~ Avijeet Das

It's just me and my guitar, and the rhythm's from there, and the poetry of life. ~ Terrence Howard

I have always wanted what I have now come to call the voice of personal narrative. That has always been the appealing voice in poetry. It started for me lyrically in Shakespeare's sonnets. ~ Diane Wakoski

Moonlight and high wind.
Dark poplars toss, insinuate the sea. ~ Li-Young Lee

Daisy, simple and discreet flower,
That earned the heart of this poet. ~ Doutor Luis Alexandre Ribeiro Branco

The poet is never inspired, because he is the master of that which appears to others as inspiration. He does not wait for inspiration to fall out of the heavens like roasted ortolans. He knows how to hunt ... He is never inspired because he is unceasingly inspired, because the powers of poetry are always at his disposition, subjected to his will, submissive to his own activity ... ~ Raymond Queneau

Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face. ~ Anne Sexton

And, of course, that is what all of this is - all of this: the one song, ever changing, ever reincarnated, that speaks somehow from and to and for that which is ineffable within us and without us, that is both prayer and deliverance, folly and wisdom, that inspires us to dance or smile or simply to go on, senselessly, incomprehensibly, beatifically, in the face of mortality and the truth that our lives are more ill-writ, ill-rhymed and fleeting than any song, except perhaps those songs - that song, endlesly reincarnated - born of that truth, be it the moon and June of that truth, or the wordless blue moan, or the rotgut or the elegant poetry of it. That nameless black-hulled ship of Ulysses, that long black train, that Terraplane, that mystery train, that Rocket '88', that Buick 6 - same journey, same miracle, same end and endlessness. ~ Nick Tosches

you were not wrong for leaving
you were wrong for coming back
and thinking
you could have me
when it was convenient
and leave when it was not ~ Rupi Kaur

It's never going to be very mainstream. One reason is that poetry requires concentration, both on the part of the writer and the reader. But it's kind of unkillable, poetry. It's our most ancient artform and I think it's more relevant today than ever, because it's one person saying what they really believe. ~ Simon Armitage

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

Release-
For years
they told you to
sit.
Stay.

Now they open the door
and tell you to
get up.
Leave.

Where do you go
with no one
to show you
the way? ~ Keelie Breanna

You touched my flawed life so gently with love
burning upward in dark steady flame
burning me, burning me into healing. ~ Christy Brown

Poetry, is the insulation that lies between the inner walls of the mind. ~ Robert M. Hensel

Speak to the breeze cautiously during those lonely summer nights. ~ Marlen Komar

The longer the silence remains untouched the longer the miscommunication creates its own stories. ~ Christina Strigas

Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur the artist to new heights if it does not cripple him or her. ~ David Lehman

Naked before my eyes,
I thank whatever Gods created your
ancestors. ~ Ijeoma Umebinyuo

Mom Cecilia

Singing voices, drums and cymbals play!
Music patroness you always are,
But mom for me,
Though strangely far you dwell now.

And ever smile,
And ever talk.
All moms are Cecilias,
And you are mine. ~ J.M.K. Walkow

You're Times New Roman, but I'm more Comic Sans. ~ Kestral M. Gaian

I became part of his ocean, an ocean of poetry that swayed and moved anybody near, that plunged up against every chair and table and tugged and tried our souls. His poem left me dry-mouthed and hungry, diminished only slightly from the bitterness of the beer I continually forgot was in my hand. ~ Annie Fisher