Collected Shorter Poems Quotes

these days of exotic splendour may stand out
in each lifetime like marble
mileposts in an alluvial land ~ W. H. Auden

Books become my refuge. Reading keeps me hopeful. I fall in love with small poems, the shorter the better- haiku from Japan, and tiny rhymes by Emily Dickinson. ~ Margarita Engle

Flowers bloomed without glimpsing your smile in spring, leaves have fallen in autumn chiming in with the gloom, the chill of winter has gone and now is the first light of summer without you near but in our hearts will forever hold you dear ... Elizabeth's Shorter Poems ~ Elizabeth E. Castillo

I can't actually explain why my lines got shorter, but they did. Just as I can't explain why my early poems were 'all image' and my current ones are relatively abstract. The sense of the line changed with the theme, somehow my ear (or brain or heart/mind) fell in love with a short line and very very simple words. ~ Gregory Orr

If I'm very drunk, I can improvise. But generally speaking, no. Generally speaking, almost all of my work is material that was first done on the printed page. And the shorter ones that you might call poems, I had a stretch from '79, '80, for five or six years, where I wrote a lot of poetry as such. Simply because I was asked to. ~ Richard Meltzer

The essay is one of my favourite forms of writing, and I feel like what's inside is really personal, more so than with shorter pieces. ~ Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

So What Did You Think of His Poetry? {Couplet}
He was a humdrum poet who left his Hallmark upon the world;
in his poems an umbrella never opened, they all magically unfurled. ~ Beryl Dov

Explore me,' you said and I collected my ropes, flasks and maps, expecting to be back home soon. I dropped into the mass of you and I cannot find the way out. Sometimes I think I'm free, coughed up like Jonah from the whale, but then I turn a corner and recognise myself again. Myself in your skin, myself lodged in your bones, myself floating in the cavities that decorate every surgeon's wall. That is how I know you. You are what I know. ~ Jeanette Winterson

when I finally begin to drift
into sleep
your memory is the...first
and the moonlight
the last, to kiss my face. ~ Sanober Khan

I have written in my life many critical poems, but viewed in retrospect, they were merely a human harmless reflection, and not a true likeness of the real society of today. ~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

Many of my poems try to use a comic element to reach a place that isn't comic at all. The comic element works as a surprise. It is unexpected and energizing. ~ Stephen Dobyns

A pumpkin lives but once a year
when someone sets its soul afire
and on that night it stirs up fear
until its flame is snuffed.
But e'en one night of eerie light is fright enough. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a summer's day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying "that is all" more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking. ~ Virginia Woolf

Subtle salvation in poems and prose,
Hiding our heads in some shadow of home
I wasn't looking for wreaths or for bells,
Just someone to listen to stories I tell... ~ Toad The Wet Sprocket

I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing. ~ Seamus Heaney

Horse
[Man you will find here
a new representation of the universe
at its most poetic and most modern
Man man man man man man
Give yourself up to this art where the sublime
does not exclude charm
and brilliancy does not blur the nuance
it is now or never the moment
to be sensitive to poetry for it dominates
all dreadfully
Guillaume Apollinaire] ~ Guillaume Apollinaire

Sometimes people come up and they get infatuated with some little brief imagistic poem or something, and they say, "Oh, I really like your Zen poems." And I say, "Which ones are not Zen poems?" ~ Sam Hamill

I tend to like poems that engage me - that is to say, which do not bore me. ~ Mark Strand

Memories are better than life. Nothing I'm part of is good until later. I love what time does. I make decisions on the basis of sensing what will produce the best memory. They're my finest works: all that multidimensional and liquid maze of experience minus the fear and uncertainty, or with the fear and uncertainty changed to something else. Because they're already finished. I made them up and they comprise me. It's as if experience is only the dark, chaotic factory where these little infinity jewels are pressed into being. Everyone is the poet of their memories. Usually it's better to get things over with so you have the memory. But like the best poems, they're also never really finished because they gain new meaning as time reveals them in different lights. Maybe every memory is inside you from the beginning; they erupt and branch and merge in fantastic patterns, but if you really tried you could trace any one of them back to the same original. Maybe the best ones are all the same: of being born. Or dying, or whatever it is. ~ Richard Hell

In the Book of Poetry there are three hundred poems, but the meaning of all of them may be put in a single sentence: Have no debasing thoughts. ~ Confucius

Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca. ~ W.S. Merwin

May is a pious fraud of the almanac. ~ James Russell Lowell

The fifth-century Greek writer we know as Dionysius the Areopagite once said that as he grew older and wiser his books got shorter and shorter. ~ Anonymous

The world, finally, tries to rob us in lots of ways. I like poems to do a bit of taking back for us. ~ Terry Blackhawk

I shaved away my teeth and made them into little pencil points for nice teeth, that's kind of weird if you think about it. I was a notorious teeth-grinder, so all my front teeth became a couple millimeters shorter. ~ Chrissy Teigen

I do not know how to make poems ~ Henri Michaux

WANT TO DO WITH YOU WHAT SPRING DOES WITH THE CHERRY TREES." Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair * ~ Chance Carter

I would say my being disheartened has more to do with American culture than anything else. We are becoming a very shallow culture. My goodness, the celebrity ethos has taken over completely. Turn on the television and you see that over and over. There's very little substance. And so, everything gets shorter. Everything is entertainment oriented. Our churches reflect that. A thirty-five minute sermon without a Power Point or video clips is rare these days. That's not true in other countries so much. ~ Philip Yancey

As he took her hand
he gave her
all she had been
waiting for--
a shiver
down her spine. ~ Atticus Poetry

Sound.
Noise
the air employs.
Melodies sweet.
Tweet, tweet, tweet.
Soft. Loud.
A roaring crowd.
Cluck. Caw. Crow.
Tet, tet. Tis, tis.
Guttural growl.
Harrowing howl.
Drip, drip, drip.
Tap, tap, tap.
Moan and groan.
Endless drone.
Ding, dang, dong.
A church bell song.
Vibrations in my ear
to hear.
Sound. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

The words that bore the deathless verse of Homer from bard to a group of fascinated hearers, and with whose fading sounds the poems passed beyond recall, are fixed on the printed page in a hundred tongues. They carry to a million eyes what once could reach but a hundred ears. ~ Nicholas Murray Butler

If you would make war,' he would say to to General d'Hedouville in December 1799, 'wage it with energy and severity; it is the only means of making it shorter and consequently less deplorable for mankind. ~ Andrew Roberts

Isabelle's moods began to vary with alarming speed. She wondered if she had always been this way and simply failed to notice. No. Good heavens, you noticed something like this: driving to the A&P feeling collected and cozy, as though your clothes fit around you exactly right, and by the time you drove home feeling completely undone, because as you walked across the parking lot the smell of the grocery bag you held in your arms mingled with the smell of spring and produced some scrape of longing in your heart. Frankly, it was exhausting. Because for all those moments of hope that God was near, of some bursting, some widening seeming to take place in her heart, Isabelle had other moments that could only be described as rage. (117) ~ Elizabeth Strout

How could I let my passion fall victim to my pain? ~ Natalie Nascenzi

...the best poems were like little vessels that carry messages that can't be transported in any other way; miniature worlds like tiny paintings or Faberge eggs. ~ Jonathan Hull

My post-child period resulted in one instant change: I write shorter books for kids. ~ Berkeley Breathed

Then came the matter of food. For ten hours he picked grains of rice off the floor and collected pasta, sugar, and individual tea leaves. He would not eat anything that had been tainted with blood, and was left with less than a third of his rations. Some things - powdered cocoa, for example - were uncollectible, or had risen on the wind. He had kerosene enough for one pot of boiling water and one hour of lamplight each day. Some of his blankets had bullet holes. ~ Mark Helprin

If nothing else, Prophet prided himself on his ability to be irrational. Everyone was always raving about how being cool, calm, and collected was the best way to be. Prophet found the exact opposite worked most of the time. Tommy ~ S.E. Jakes

To me, writing is a matter of voice. I think like that. The expression I sometimes use to myself is 'actual song.' That what I do is somewhere on the line between speaking to you as I am now and actual song. And the things I love when I say one of those poems to myself - it's a little bit like singing, it's a little bit like speaking. ~ Robert Pinsky

An Englishman once said that he found it easier to be a member of a club than of the human race because the bylaws were shorter, and he knew all the members personally. That sounds about right. ~ Nelson DeMille

I can pull you taut, Ashleigh. Like the poems. I can bring you back together. You are so fucking delicious, Ashleigh. So fucking perfect. I wish I could take this pain away from you, really, I swear I feel your sadness and it makes me crazy. Do I ask for more information and risk the tears? Do I pretend it's not happening and risk you feeling ignored? Tell me what to do. ~ J.A. Huss

What if heaven is just a vast consciousness that the dead return to? And their assignment is to report on the experiences they collected during their time on earth? ... The spring mornings they woke up to a million birds singing their hearts out, and the summer afternoons with the swim towels hung over the porch rail, and the October air that smelled like wood smoke and apple cider, and the warm yellow windows of home when they came in on a snowy night. That's what my experience has been,' they say, and it gets folded in with the others
one more report on what living felt like. What it was like to be alive. ~ Anne Tyler

Creativity is essential to any kind of joyful living. Sometimes I act, sometimes I draw, I paint, I write poems. I can't imagine living without it. ~ Zephyr Teachout

HOME

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won't let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it's not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn't be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
Warsan Shire

Since they weren't sleepy and nothing had been left unsaid, they began to read poetry to each other, taking turns like children and enjoying it. Bachir had a lovely voice, one that was already that of a man. He knew many poems by heart. He lovingly recited Victor Hugo, with warmth Rimbaud's Le bateau ivre, and poems written by young people going into battle; he then moved on to the poets of liberty - Rimbaud again, Eluard, and Desnos. ~ Assia Djebar

Wherever
we walk
we will make
Wherever
we protest
we will go planting
Make poems
seed grass
feed a child growing
build a house
Whatever we stand against
We will stand feeding and seeding
Wherever
I walk
I will make ~ Muriel Rukeyser