Chahy Poetry Quotes

The reader reads aloud, with a sing-song up ... then down ... then down again cadence. My mood shifts from merely reluctant to derisive. It's a tired reading style. I'm sick of it. It attaches more importance to the words than the words themselves - as they've been arranged - could possibly sustain, and it gives poets and poetry a bad name. ~ Gabrielle Hamilton

Since so much of the poetry machine is consumed in and with the mirroring and the reproduction of what is already preexistent, I don't understand why such paranoiac conservatism is dedicated to labels. It's a way of controlling the "other," to label them. ~ Fady Joudah

I think poetry can help children deal with the other subjects on the curriculum by enabling them to see a subject in a new way. ~ Carol Ann Duffy

It is the age of numbers, isn't it? So we are numbers and the Elbees are words. We are mathemathics and they are poetry. We are winning and they are losing; and so of course they're afraid of us, it's like a struggle inside human nature itself, between what's mechanical and utilitarian in us and the part that loves and dreams. We all fear that the cold machine-like thing in human nature will destroy our magic and song. ~ Salman Rushdie

That my poetry has become something I'm proud of.
The way the words say what I mean,
how they twist and turn language,
how they connect with people.
How they build a community. ~ Elizabeth Acevedo

We are all a little broken, looking for something whole to hang on to. But sometimes, what seems whole is even more broken than we are. ~ J.A. ANUM

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented. ~ Mark Strand

I do not say there were no hurts. / I say they mattered less than love. ~ Jane Merchant

I saw it from that hidden, silent place
Where the old wood half shuts the meadow in.
It shone through all the sunset's glories - thin
At first, but with a slowly brightening face.
Night came, and that lone beacon, amber-hued,
Beat on my sight as never it did of old;
The evening star - but grown a thousandfold
More haunting in this hush and solitude.
It traced strange pictures on the quivering air -
Half-memories that had always filled my eyes -
Vast towers and gardens; curious seas and skies
Of some dim life - I never could tell where.
But I knew that through the cosmic dome
Those rays were calling from my far, lost home. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

They cannot understand that the figure of a laborer - some furrows in a plowed field, a bit of sand, sea and sky - are serious objects, so difficult but at the same time so beautiful, that it is indeed worth while to devote one's life to the task of expressing the poetry hidden in them. ~ Brenda Ueland

That's the joy of myths. The fun comes in telling them yourself - something I warmly encourage you to do, you person reading this. Read the stories in this book, then make them your own, and on some dark and icy winter's evening, or on a summer night when the sun will not set, tell your friends what happened when Thor's hammer was stolen, or how Odin obtained the mead of poetry for the gods . . . ~ Neil Gaiman

In pursuing certain virtues - colorful local effects, personae and personality, juxtaposition, close calls with nonsense, uncertainty, critiques of ordinary language - the current crop of American poets necessarily give up on others. ~ Stephen Burt

]Sardis
often turning her thoughts here
]
you like a goddess
and in your song most of all she rejoiced.
But now she is conspicuous among Lydian women
as sometimes at sunset
the rosyfingered moon
surpasses all the stars. And her light
stretches over salt sea
equally and flowerdeep fields.
And the beautiful dew is poured out
and roses bloom and frail
chervil and flowering sweetclover.
But she goes back and forth remembering
gentle Atthis and in longing
she bites her tender mind ~ Sappho

Poetry keeps my heart neat, even when incomplete, I find peace. ~ Delano Johnson

What a conception of art must those theorists have who exclude portraits from the proper province of the fine arts! It is exactly as if we denied that to be poetry in which the poet celebrates the woman he really loves. Portraiture is the basis and the touchstone of historic painting. ~ August Wilhelm Von Schlegel

When humankind cannot produce a philosopher to speak its mind, it longs for a poet to sing its heart ~ Subhan Zein

Memories are the height of poetry only when they are memories of happiness. When they graze wounds over which scars have formed they become an aching pain. ~ Ivan Goncharov

Nd I smile
and know
why people write music and paint and dance, lifted as if they can fly,
because this ache
crashing inside
needs to be free.
sometimes, love
becomes a melody
others hum for years. ~ Pat Mora

The monsters were never
under my bed.
Because the monsters
were inside my head.


I fear no monsters,
for no monsters I see.
Because all this time
the monster has been me. ~ Nikita Gill

Plagiarism has been around far longer than the Internet. In fact, I had a poem published in 'Seventeen' magazine when I was 15 years old. About a year later I was informed that there was a girl who used that same poem to win a statewide poetry competition in Alabama. It took months for people to put together that this had happened. ~ Megan McCafferty

On the surface simplicity
But the darkest pit in me
It's Pagan poetry
Pagan poetry ~ Bjork

Because this painting has never been restored there is a heightened poignance to it somehow; it doesn't have the feeling of unassailable permanence that paintings in museums do.

There is a small crack in the lower left, and a little of the priming between the wooden panel and the oil emulsions of paint has been bared. A bit of abrasion shows, at the rim of a bowl of berries, evidence of time's power even over this - which, paradoxically, only seems to increase its poetry, its deep resonance. If you could see the notes of a cello, when the bow draws slowly and deeply across its strings, and those resonant reverberations which of all instruments' are nearest to the sound of the human voice emerge - no, the wrong verb, they seem to come into being all at once, to surround us, suddenly, with presence - if that were made visible, that would be the poetry of Osias Beert.

But the still life resides in absolute silence.

Portraits often seem pregnant with speech, or as if their subjects have just finished saying something, or will soon speak the thoughts that inform their faces, the thoughts we're invited to read. Landscapes are full of presences, visible or unseen; soon nymphs or a stag or a band of hikers will make themselves heard.

But no word will ever be spoken here, among the flowers and snails, the solid and dependable apples, this heap of rumpled books, this pewter plate on which a few opened oysters lie, giving up their silver.
Mark Doty

Home is where the heart begins, but not where the heart stays. ~ Hanif Abdurraqib

Irish improves a poet. ~ Sina Queyras

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

Winter is already a lost shape, forgotten
in the ground. Instead, here is Spring
with all the grace of a woman
smoothing out her apron. ~ Cecilia Llompart

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay ~ William Butler Yeats

The gristle of the underneath stings in the air of responsibility. ~ Mark Ryan

In 1914... [German] history, poetry, dream and the individual moment were all combined in one exhilarating sensation...The nation was a creation of one's imagination, a poetic truth, an ethical, not a social, construct... blind obedience was the true value... the stronger a person is... the more he obeys. ~ Modris Eksteins, The Rites Of Spring

It isn't true about the lambs.
They are not meek.
They are curious and wild,
full of the passion of spring.
They are lovable,
and they are not silent when hungry.

Tonight the last of the triplet lambs
is piercing the quiet with its need.
Its siblings are stronger
and will not let it eat.

I am its keeper, the farmer, its mother.
I will go down to it in the dark,
in the cold barn,
and hold it in my arms.

But it will not lie still--it is not meek.

I will stand in the open doorway
under the weight of watching trees and moon,
and care for it as one of my own.

But it will not love me--it is not meek.

Drink, little one. Take what I can give you.
Tonight the whole world prowls
the perimeters of your life.

Your anger keeps you alive--
it's your only chance.
So I know what I must do
after I have fed you.

I will shape my mouth to the shape
of the sharpest words--
even those bred in silence.

I will impale with words every ear
pressed upon open air.
I will not be meek.

You remind me of the necessity
of having more hope than fear
and of sounding out terrible names.

I am to cry out loud
like a hungry lamb, cry loud
enough to waken wolves in the night.

No one can be allowed to sleep. ~ Alice B. Fogel

Christmas poem to a man in jail
hello Bill Abbott:
I appreciate your passing around my books in
jail there, my poems and stories.
if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with
my books, fine.
but literature, you know, is difficult for the
average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too);
I don't like most poetry, for example,
so I write mine the way I like to read it. ~ Charles Bukowski

Blood was its Avatar and its seal. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend upon it for their daily bread, and the highest form of literature, poetry, brings no wealth to the singer. For producing your best work also you will require some leisure and freedom from sordid care. ~ Oscar Wilde

The obsessions of others are opaque to the unobsessed, and thus easy to mock. NASCAR, jazz, baseball, roses, poetry, quilts, fishing. If we're lucky, we all have at least one. ~ Roberta Smith

I got a bit obsessed with the whole English language and was writing journals and poetry. I've always been intrigued about psychology and philosophy and how people's minds work. ~ Lara Pulver

My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive
in the universe. ~ Carl Sandburg

All voices are important, and yet it seems that people of color have a lot to say, particularly if you look through the poetry of young people - a lot of questions and a lot of concerns about immigration and security issues, you name it - big questions. ~ Juan Felipe Herrera

O God bid my poor body to arise
On that bright day triumphant through the skies! ~ Timothy Salter

I wasn't afraid of being poor. I didn't want to live in a big house. I'm the perfect size for poetry. I can move around. ~ Eileen Myles

Some nights you drink tea, some nights you drink whisky. ~ Atticus Poetry

And when our smiles meet I become speechless, My pen becomes wordless by thy sight, So I choose silence in your presence, Oh! The joy to watch you without judgment… ~ Piyush Rohankar

Terror is an artery.
Running unfailing channels of bloodied thoroughfares by dint of the wilds beyond our knowing. Fluctuations and murmurs are audible within the splintered leeway of our preserve as a consequence of interstices modeled in such brutality. This appended artery offers no direction; idle and at times desultory. Bloodstained tracks and avenues guide casualties.
Terror, like death, is not complicated, nor is it simple. It is but routine - natural. To call it otherwise is to parsimoniously say that birth is effortless, hurricanes are facile, and earthquakes are meek when they are a lot more.
Myths, parables, and allegories lie in the construct of terror. Kings have fallen and succeeded in the yarns of terror. Simple men have been turned into heroes due to terror. Villains have been great orchestrators in the art of terror, allowing sole individuals and denizens to feel their makings. A soul never needed God to feel terror. The most nihilistic can undergo such a dreadful emotion. Animals are perfect examples of this. They are well-equipped creations to the world of terror and death, holding no cognizance to deity or creator.
Terror is quite exclusive as it is a function of the mind, conducted by the intersections and throughways of nerves and bounded to that alone. Although it approaches with university, like hunger or sickness, it is selfish by fashion and segregating in nature. But death is quite opposite… death is all embracing. Disregarded ~ J.C. Whitfield

Gunn would be an important figure-rewarding, delightful, accomplished, enduring-in the history of English-language poetry even were his life not as fascinating as it now seems; he would be an important figure in the history of gay writing and in the history of transatlantic literary relations even were his poetry not so good as it is. With his life as it was and his works as they are, he's an obvious candidate for a volume of retrospective and critical essays, and this one is first-rate. ~ Stephen Burt

writing home"

here in the wilderness of australia
writing home becomes easy
in spite of the spreading wild fires
there is less heat, more certainty.

writing home, writing this
i think of those without real homes–
our city, people say, provides houses
which do not, often, bring one home. ~ Kirpal Singh

Art begs you to notice it. Why? Because art is God's way of saying hello. So pay attention to poetry. Pay attention to music. Pay attention to paintings and sculptures and photo exhibits and ballets and plays. Don't let all this go unnoticed. Your world is shouting out to you, revealing something intrinsically glorious about itself. Listen carefully. Love art, the way art loves life. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

A little road not made of man,
Enabled of the eye,
Accessible to thill of bee,
Or cart of butterfly.

If town it have, beyond itself,
'T is that I cannot say;
I only sigh, - no vehicle
Bears me along that way. ~ Emily Dickinson

Guardian spirits of mankind, have we thought about the powers that passion creates in human beings? Have we considered why a man could run through a field of fire to get to a woman he loves? Have we thought about the impact of love on the body of lovers? Have we considered the symmetry of its power? Have we considered what poetry incites in their souls, and the impress of endearments on a softened heart? ~ Chigozie Obioma