Albany Poets Quotes

Remember The Poem ... ~ R.M. Engelhardt

Genius everywhere is one. In the Orient and in the Occident the deep thinkers are kin, the poets are cousins, the pioneers of the spirit are the messengers of peace and good will to the world. Their works are the open highways between nations, and they themselves are the ever living guardians and guides. ~ Ameen Rihani

Philosophers, Poets and Fools have similar Consciousness ~ Amit Gupta

What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves. ~ W. H. Auden

Sorry to inform you...but as a fellow failed miner, the problem is there's nowhere left to dig.
We're real poets man.
And whatever. But it's the digging, it's the holes! Its these burrows to half nestle in just to pass the time, to chafe the inner thigh of boredom and that level of power-demanding pain is only in existence because you really, really know that there isn't anything else.
The holes.
And me missing a shovel, that has created the voids, the tears, the fucks, the sucks, the shame, the stares, the songs, the words, and in admittedly, even more holes. Not having one of my shovels has somehow overcompensated the digs in which I've dug.
The holes.
The holes are why you smoke aware of cancer, a disease to take over years of boring lives, and give us a bone to gnaw on, overcome, defeat, lick-dry, or die.
The holes are why you drink with your last dollars, when you know you're going to throw it up tonight anyway.
The holes are why you think you're in love, and that's a hole that you might not climb back from.
The holes, the holes the holes, making you question everything standing at a bus stop...smelling like cigarettes and perfume...signing up for classes you wont go to... hand covered in club stamps... face covered in guilt... Maybe go to a protest and just stand there...Or lay in bed when there's no way you can sleep... ~ Wesley Eisold

You were the poem I never knew how to write because no words could describe the wind you cannot see, but feel. ~ Shannon L. Alder

Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water. ~ Robert Frost

Many of the poets I most admire have a way of embodying their peculiar obsessions via landscape that can sometimes seem magical. ~ Anna Journey

i want to be
in love with you

the same way
i am in
love with the moon

with the light
shining
out of its soul. ~ Sanober Khan

In the spring of 1854, some of my publications persuaded King Maximilian II of Bavaria to offer me, at the suggestion of Emanuel Geibel, a position in Munich with an annual salary of 1000 guilders, to take part in his so-called symposia, weekly soirees at which scholars and poets were gathered. ~ Paul Heyse

everything i know about love
is that it hurts
and is almost always never returned
the way you want it to.

but i have hope
because i do not know everything. ~ AVA.

We all have known good critics, who have stamped out poet's hopes; Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state; Good patriots, who, for a theory, risked a cause; Good kings, who disemboweled for a tax; Good Popes, who brought all good to jeopardy; Good Christians, who sat still in easy-chairs; And damned the general world for standing up. Now, may the good God pardon all good men! ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I defer to all these other American poets who, for some reason, I both envy and admire. ~ Charles Olson

We read poetry because the poets, like ourselves, have been haunted by the inescapable tyranny of time and death; have suffered the pain of loss, and the more wearing, continuous pain of frustration and failure; and have had moods of unlooked-for release and peace. They have known and watched in themselves and others. ~ Elizabeth Drew

The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it. ~ Henry David Thoreau

How are you supposed to know what to read next? This is the question that keeps us up at night, so at Day One our mission is to feed an audience of literature-hungry, time-constrained readers like you with a weekly lineup of talented authors, poets, and artists that we believe you will love. And if we can identify some of the next generation of literary stars, and cultivate an appreciation for transformative poetry and fiction, then frankly we will sleep better at night. ~ Carmen Johnson

Since childhood, it was my dream to go where all the poets and artists had been. Rimbaud, Artaud, Brancusi, Camus, Picasso, Bresson, Goddard, Jeanne Moreau, Juliette Greco, everybody - Paris for me was a Mecca. ~ Patti Smith

One difficulty that people seeking to modernize hymnals and the language of worship inevitably run into is that contemporaries are never the best judges of what works and what doesn't. This is something all poets know; that language is a living thing, beyond our control, and it simply takes time for the trendy to reveal itself, to become so obviously dated that it falls by the way, and for the truly innovative to take hold. ~ Kathleen Norris

You could take winos off the sidewalk in front of the drugstore and teach them to be poets in half an hour. ~ Nell Zink

Senseless people name evil good, call good evil. As you are doing. You accuse Us of passing false judgement: you do Us injustice. We shall prove this to you. You ask who We are: We are God's handle, Master Death, a truly effective reaper. Our scythe works its way. It cuts down white, black, red, brown, green, blue, grey, yellow, and all kinds of lustrous flowers in its path, irrespective of their splendour, their strength, their virtue. And the violet's beautiful colour, rich perfume, and palatable sap, avail it nought. See: that is justice. Our justification was acknowledged by the Romans and the poets, for they knew Us better than you do.
You ask what We are: We are nothing, and yet something. Nothing, because We have neither life, nor being, nor form, and We are no spirit, not visible, not tangible; something, because We are the end of life, the end of existence, the beginning of nullity, a cross between the two. We are a happening that fells all people. Huge giants must fall before Us; all living beings must be transformed by Us.
You ask where We are: We are not ascertainable. But Our form was found in a temple in Rome*, painted on a wall, as a hoodwinked man sitting on an ox; this man wielded a hatchet in his right hand and a shovel in his left hand, with which he was beating the ox. A great crowd of all kinds of people was hitting him, fighting him, and making casts at him, each one with the tools of his trade: even the nun with her psalter was there. They str ~ Johannes Von Saaz

I think 'Dead Poets' was probably my favorite, just to get started with the idea of doing a movie that people treated as more than a movie. ~ Robin Williams

Forget scientists. The next space launch we should send up painters, poets and musicians. I'd be more interested in what they discover than anything that takes place in a test tube. ~ James Rozoff

Rare almost as great poets, rarer, perhaps, than veritable saints and martyrs; are consummate men of business. A man, to be excellent in this way, requires a great knowledge of character, with that exquisite tact which feels unerringly the right moment when to act. A discreet rapidity must pervade all the movements of his thought and action. He must be singularly free from vanity, and is generally found to be an enthusiast who has the art to conceal his enthusiasm. ~ Arthur Helps

A single poem
is worth a hundred
cozy winter nights
kind words
and healed wounds. ~ Sanober Khan

In our period, they say there is free speech. They say there is no penalty for poets, There is no penalty for writing poems. They say this. This is the penalty. ~ Muriel Rukeyser

I suspect that the age of letters is waning, for our time. It is the age of Panama Canals, of Sandra Bernhardt, of Western wheat raising, of merely material expansion. Art, form, may return, but I doubt I shall live to see them
I don't believe they are as eternal as the poets say. ~ Henry James

Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers. ~ Dan Simmons

The thing I like about the band [Dead Child] is that there's no pretense. We aren't even trying to be artists or poets. ~ David Pajo

Ocean waters..oceans deep..Serious poets never sleep. ~ Sally-Ann Roberts

In Latin America in general, and Cuba in particular, poets have been the inspiration behind struggles for independence, struggles for freedom of all sorts. ~ Margarita Engle

But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty. ~ Eugenio Montale

Thus the sons of earth now drink in
The fire of heaven without danger.
And it is our duty, poets, to stand
Bare-headed under the storms of God,
Grasping with our own hand
The Father's beam itself,
And to offer the gift of heaven,
Wrapped in song, to the people.
From "As On a Holiday" ("Wie Wenn am Feiertage") ~ Friedrich Holderlin

The poem is an act beyond paraphrase because what is being said is always inseparable from the way it is being said. Osip Mandelstam suggested that if a poem can be paraphrased, then the sheets haven't been rumpled, poetry hasn't spent the night. The words are an (erotic) visitation, a means to an end, but also an end in and of themselves. The poets is first of all a language worker. A maker. A shaper of language. ~ Edward Hirsch

I was able to read poets that were - allowed me to be humorous without being silly. ~ Billy Collins

For the path of comets/ is the path of poets: they burn without warming,/ pick without cultivating. They are: an explosion, a breaking in ~ Marina Tsvetaeva

A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind. ~ Gustav Stresemann

Her poetry is written on the ghost of trees, whispered on the lips of lovers.
As a little girl, she would drift in and out of libraries filled with dead poets and their musky scent. She held them in her hands and breathed them in
wanting so much to be part of their world ...
It was on her sixteenth birthday that she first fell in love. With a boy who brought her red roses and white lies. When he broke her heart, she cried for days.
Then hopeful, she sat with a pen in her hand, poised over the blank white sheet, but it refused to draw blood ...
She learned too late that poets are among the damned, cursed to commiserate over their loss, to reach with outstretched hands
hands that will never know the weight of what they seek. ~ Lang Leav

The scholar explained, very neatly, that a play might well have something interesting about it, but no literary value. He demonstrated, without wasting words, that a playwright had to do more than throw in some of the complications found in all novels, and perpetually attractive to theater audiences. Playwrights had to be novel without being bizarre, frequently sublime but never unnatural; they had to understand the human heart had let it speak for itself; they had to be great poets but never let any of their characters sound like poets; they had to perfectly understand language and use it purely, with continuous harmony, never disjointing it with forced rhyme. ~ Voltaire

Of all races and eras these States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets, ~ Walt Whitman

Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies. ~ Frank O'Hara