Americo Liberian Poet Quotes

The Lone Star of Africa Land of the free, on your beach and sacred forests loves flourished. You, Liberia, you my love to echo, the scream of freedom, holding tight and will never let go. O beautiful land, The Lone star for decades has survived wars and tribalism the elders who keep the ancestral treasures that resulted in Vandalism. When will morning break for great leaders to stand for what is right Mother Liberia? ~ Henry Johnson Jr

People are speaking about discovering the cure for Ebola, HIV, and Cancer but it bugs me that there is no remedy for "Racism". It's a human disease that's hard to eradicate even in 2014 America, South Africa, European countries and some part of Asia still can't get over this disease. Some people raised their little ones to think that way. It's taught from a young age. ~ Henry Johnson Jr

Freed slaves returned to Africa settled in a section of what was known as the "Pepper Coast" and on July 26, 1847, issued a Declaration of Independence and established a constitution based on the political principles denoted in the United States Constitution. In doing so they established the independent Republic of Liberia. Law and Order was something the ruling class of Liberians prided themselves on. The Americo Liberians, as they called themselves, were uber-Conservatives and had a glorified picture of what the American government was like. As Conservatives they saw themselves living a privileged lifestyle, sustained by their faith in God and the blessings that had been bestowed upon them by this deity. Amongst themselves there was much talk about the subjects of freedom, liberty, democracy and independence. They felt that these idealisms were deserved because of their exceptionalism. Taking a page from the concept of American exceptionalism, they fantasied of their very own Liberian exceptionalism, completely forgetting the indigenous natives living among them. Whereas the Americo Liberians lived an affluent lifestyle reflecting the antebellum era in the Southern tier of the United States, the local blacks, for the greatest part lived in squalor. In 1980, a violent military coup shattered the way of life in Liberia. Led by army Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, the country's ruling group of Americo-Liberians were brutally overthrown and frequently executed. Doe's term as Presid ~ Hank Bracker

Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if we all got along. If there were no terrorism, Islamophobia, Western hypocrisy, corrupt government in African countries (especially Liberia), sexism, nativism, people like Donald Trump, stereotypes, war, Capitalism, Communism, Marxism and xenophobia. ~ Henry Johnson Jr

What is a living reality without experience? If there is anything about which we feel to be true, it is that the world we endure is authentic. We can see, touch and hear it. Our conscious existence of presence is an exhibition within the mind, but in many other occurrences, some of us rarely accept that we create our own realities. ~ Henry Johnson Jr

A robust Liberian middle-class fosters the advancement of social wealth and a well-educated Liberian society. ~ Henry Johnson Jr

If you are going to doubts, don't dream. If you are going to dream, don't doubt. If you are not dreaming, you are not really living. When we learn how to dream, we learn how to be FREE. ~ Henry Johnson Jr

Let's start a revolution, a revolution with no gun, but words and action to inspire the next generation. The truth should make us better human beings, it shouldn't create enemies out of ignorance. "IGNORANCE" got Liberia way, way back, because some of us were blind back then and failed to see the clear picture before. Before it was the Americo VS the Native. Today is corrupt educated or not so educated Liberian brothers and sisters against those people who they call illiterate. STAND FOR CHANGE AND SAY NO! ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! ~ Henry Johnson Jr

Before I was ever a poet, my father was writing poems about me, so it was a turning of the tables when I became a poet and started answering, speaking back to his poems in ways that I had not before. ~ Natasha Trethewey

Occasionally there is a moment in a person's life when he takes a great stride forward in wisdom, humility, or disillusionment. For a split second he comes into a kind of cosmic understanding. For a trembling breath of time he knows all there is to know. He is loaned the gift the poet yearned for - seeing himself as others see him. ~ Betty Smith

Difficulty itself may be a path toward concentration - expended effort weaves us into a task, and successful engagement, however laborious, becomes also a labor of love. The work of writing brings replenishment even to the writer dealing with painful subjects or working out formal problems, and there are times when suffering's only open path is through an immersion in what is. The eighteenth-century Urdu poet Ghalib described the principle this way: 'For the raindrop, joy is in entering the river - / Unbearable pain becomes its own cure.'
"Difficulty then, whether of life or of craft, is not a hindrance to an artist. Sartre called genius 'not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.' Just as geological pressure transforms ocean sediment into limestone, the pressure of an artist's concentration goes into the making of any fully realized work. Much of beauty, both in art and in life, is a balancing of the lines of forward-flowing desire with those of resistance - a gnarled tree, the flow of a statue's draped cloth. Through such tensions, physical or mental, the world in which we exist becomes itself. Great art, we might say, is thought that has been concentrated in just this way: honed and shaped by a silky attention brought to bear on the recalcitrant matter of earth and of life. We seek in art the elusive intensity by which it knows. ~ Jane Hirshfield

Prose and poetry are as different as food and drink. ~ Franz Grillparzer

Try to keep them, poet, those erotic visions of yours, however few of them there are that can be stilled. Put them, half-hidden, in your lines. ~ C.P. Cavafy

There are many things you can lie your way through; poetry is not one of them. ~ Nicole Lyons

The normal present connects the past and the future through limitation. Contiguity results, crystallization by means of solidification. There also exists, however, a spiritual present that identifies past and future through dissolution, and this mixture is the element, the atmosphere of the poet. ~ Novalis

If the poet spun for half an hour daily, his poetry would gain in richness. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

A habitual indulgence in the inarticulate is a sure sign of the philosopher who has not learned to think, the poet who has not learned to write, the painter who has not learned to paint, and the impression that has not learned to express itself
all of which are compatible with an immensity of genius in the inexpressible soul. ~ George Santayana

I've read dozens of interviews and accounts that basically come down to How Poets Do It and the truth is they're all do-lally and they're all different. There's Gerard Manly Hopkins in his black Jesuit clothes lying face down on the ground to look at an individual bluebell, Robert Frost who never used a desk, was once caught short by a poem coming and wrote it on the sole of his shoe, T.S. Eliot in his I'm-not-a-Poet suit with his solid sensible available-for-poetry three hours a day, Ted Hughes folded into his tiny cubicle at the top of the stairs where there is no window, no sight or smell of earth or animal but the rain clatter on the roof bows him to the page, Pablo Neruda who grandly declared poetry should only ever be handwritten, and then added his own little bit of bonkers by saying: in green ink. Poets are their own nation. Most of them know. ~ Niall Williams

If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak. ~ Ben Lerner

An editor doesn't just read, he reads well, and reading well is a creative, powerful act. The ancients knew this and it frightened them. Mesopotamian society, for instance, did not want great reading from its scribes, only great writing. Scribes had to submit to a curious ruse: they had to downplay their reading skills lest they antagonize their employer. The Attic poet Menander wrote: "those who can read see twice as well." Ancient autocrats did not want their subjects to see that well. Order relied on obedience, not knowledge and reflection. So even though he was paid to read as much as write messages, the scribe's title cautiously referred to writing alone (scribere = "to write"); and the symbol for Nisaba, the Mesopotamian goddess of scribes, was not a tablet but a stylus. In his excellent book A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel writes, "It was safer for a scribe to be seen not as one who interpreted information, but who merely recorded it for the public good."
In their fear of readers, ancients understood something we have forgotten about the magnitude of readership. Reading breeds the power of an independent mind. When we read well, we are thinking hard for ourselves - this is the essence of freedom. It is also the essence of editing. Editors are scribes liberated to not simply record and disseminate information, but think hard about it, interpret, and ultimately, influence it. ~ Susan Bell

Dear Producers,
Something is radiating deep within me and it must be transmitted or I will implode and the world will suffer a great loss, unawares. Epic are the proportions of my soul, yet without a scope who cares am I? This is why I must but must be one of the inhabitants of MTV's "Real World." Only there, burning brightly into a million dazzled eyes, will my as yet uncontoured self assume the beauteous forms that are not just its own, but an entire market niche's, due.

I am a Kirk Cameron-Kurt Cobain figure, roguishly quirky, dandified but down to earth, kooky but comprehensible; denizen of the growing penumbra between alternative and mainstream culture; angsty prophet of the already bygone apocalypse, yet upbeat, stylish and sexy!

Oscar Wilde wrote, "Good artists exist in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating... [they] live the poetry [they] cannot write." As with Dorian Gray, life is my art! Oh MTV, take me, make me, wake me from my formless slumbers and place me in the dreamy Real World of target marketing. ~ Dave Eggers

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets. ~ Christopher Morley

Feminine psychology is admittedly odd, sir. The poet Pope ... "
"Never mind about the poet Pope, Jeeves."
"No, sir."
"There are times when one wants to hear all about the poet Pope and times when one doesn't."
"Very true, sir. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

The spirit of the poet craves spectators ... even if only buffaloes. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

She was not a poet. She was a poem. ~ Deborah Levy

If there has been one overriding change in poetic practice, it is that under the influence of free verse the poets have made a primary virtue out of exactitude and economy of meaning: this has replaced metrical skill as the first thing the poet tunes to. ~ Martin Langford

Once, poets were magicians. Poets were strong, stronger than warriors or kings - stronger than old hapless gods. And they will be strong once again. ~ Greg Bear

I mainly wanted non-english writing poets, because I loved the idea that I was translating translations. ~ Simone Muench

I go out on the side of a hill, maybe hunting deer, and sit there and see the shadow of night coming over the hill, and I can swear to you there is a part of me that is absolutely untouched by anything civilized. There's a part of me that has never heard of a telephone. ~ James Dickey

Good poets borrow, great poets steal ~ T. S. Eliot

Laughing behind my hand, I followed him out to his motorcycle. "I like to think I'm hot enough that I don't need to flirt well."
"Do you? Fortunately, I agree. In fact, this time when you walk in front of me and think I'm checking out your ass, it'll be true."
"Cooper, you have such a way with words. A real poet."
"Don't I know it," he said, sliding on his bike. ~ Bijou Hunter

In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about. ~ Ray Bradbury

Her philosophy is not from this era it's from all different era .. ~ Imran Shaikh

All the poems of the poet who has entered into his poethood are poems of homecoming. ~ Martin Heidegger

Writing is also an art. ~ Marc Mullo

From the beginning, about the rude altar of the god, to the days of Goethe, of Leopardi, and of Victor Hugo, the poet is the leader in the dance of life; and the phrase by which we name his singularity, the poetic temperament, denotes the primacy of that passion in his blood with which the frame of other men is less richly charged. ~ George Edward Woodberry

A criminal sketch of Christ
on a diner napkin
-'Poet Prophets ~ Amber Koneval