Economical Poem Quotes

Good Poem

Sit,
lay down,
roll over,
here's
your treat. ~ Kristen Henderson

Darkness
I find myself set upon a ship of fools and cast adrift.
Adrift in sea of madness, steaming towards a storm of uncertainty.
Overboard, swirling, twirling tumbling.
Engulfed in madness.
Shipwrecked, marooned.
Washed upon a rock of hope.
Darkness surrounds.
Within the darkness madness laps upon a distant shore.
Morning breaks and sun rises once more.
Darkness retreats into the shadows.
Golden rays of light cleanse the mind and soul.
A new day dawns heralding sanity, and hope
for the human race once more. ~ Michael Tianias

Every time a poet is about to write, every time the open their mouth to say something, they express their inner world and tell of their own feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and opinions, unless they are deliberately pursuing fantasies which contrast with their beliefs, opinions, thoughts, and the point of view. ~ M. Fethullah Gulen

This separation happened for a reason, this esason is for our own good; God is just positioning us. ~ Euginia Herlihy

A poem is a construction of inner space.
Language is to inner space as light is to material space. ~ Sven Birkerts

He hesitated, all rational thoughts drowning in the seas of her azure eyes. ~ Poem Schway

What a mistake it was to distill the poem into something worthless ~ John Green

I haven't seen any poet in this country behave nearly as rudely as Newt Gingrich or Bill O'Reilly. I'm not asking these people to approve of everyone's manners. I don't feel obliged to defend the manners of every poet who submits a poem to my web site. That's not my job. My job is to provide them with an opportunity to speak from the heart. If there's not much in the heart and if the mouth is running wild, that's not my problem. ~ Sam Hamill

If you put the words on a page and you believe in them, then it's a poem. ~ Ewuare X. Osayande

I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem. ~ Marilyn Hacker

They come here wanting to be loved, and the boys on the stage receive them from the poem - STAY in the Book - RidingTheEscalator ~ Jay Woodman

Bhagat Singh revered Lajpat Rai as a leader. But he would not spare even Lajpat Rai, when, during the last years of his life, Lajpat Rai turned to communal politics. He then launched a political-ideological campaign against him. Because Lajpat Rai was a respected leader, he would not publicly use harsh words of criticism against him. And so he printed as a pamphlet Robert Browning's famous poem, 'The Lost Leader,' in which Browning criticizes Wordsworth for turning against liberty. The poem begins with the line 'Just for a handful of silver he left us.' A few more of the poem's lines were:
'We shall march prospering, not thro' his presence;
Songs may inspirit us, not from his lyre,' and
'Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more.'

There was not one word of criticism of Lajpat Rai. Only, on the front cover, he printed Lajpat Rai's photograph! ~ Bipan Chandra

We can live quiet, apparently sedate lives if we express our wildness by risking and leaping in our writing...The strangest, most far-out renegade part of ourselves can be expressed in a poem while we sit quietly in our kitchen or bedroom. This can save our lives ~ Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge

There are magnets in my bones for that iron in her blood. ~ Atticus Poetry

...feel the fierce way desire
tourniquets itself around you and
clings

Clubland South of Market tweak-
chic trannies powder their noses from
bullet-shaped compacts and flick their forked
tongues like switchblades as they burn the night
down bleed day to night to day to

Mission sidewalks where pythons hide
twenty dollar balloons beneath their tongues which
get bartered in smiles quicker than a coke buzz and
tossed out through the cracks

Cottonmouth kisses
camouflage emotions and
strike with a vengeance
when he
wants and she
wants and they
want and I
won't

Genet was right, I suppose
when he wrote "The only way
to avoid the horror of horror is
to give in to it"
it's
the nature of
the economy of the
business it's the
nature of
things... ~ Clint Catalyst

Maybe the world, without us, is the real poem. ~ Mary Oliver

There's a poem by Borges that begins, Ya no es mágico el mundo. Te han dejado . The world's not magical anymore. You've been left. He says left , an everyday word, a word that makes no noise. ~ Yasmina Reza

A page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains. ~ Anne Carson

Your profound words are too much for my ears to bear, as I listen to each and every senseous phrase that your lips impart ~ Vivian E. Moore

Will read a poem by Sir Walter Raleigh at his grandmother's funeral.

"Pondering the joys we had, listen & keep very still. If the lowing from the hill or the tolling of the bell do not
serve to break the spell, listen: you may be allowed to hear my laughter from a cloud. ~ Lynne Branard

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

Akhenaten Speaks:
Ô mighty sun
in thou warmth
you speaketh
an infinite message
love, vitality, regeneration
I awake with thee
then sleep in thouest golden glow ~ Ramon Ravenswood

Every poem, formal or free, has an ideal shape, and the job of the poet is to find it. ~ Peter Meinke

Never May the Fruit Be Plucked"

Never, never may the fruit be plucked from the bough
And gathered into barrels.
He that would eat of love must eat it where it hangs.
Though the branches bend like reeds,
Though the ripe fruit splash in the grass or wrinkle on the tree,
He that would eat of love may bear away with him
Only what his belly can hold,
Nothing in the apron,
Nothing in the pockets.
Never, never may the fruit be gathered from the bough
And harvested in barrels.
The winter of love is a cellar of empty bins,
In an orchard soft with rot. ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

There is always an unspeakable where, perhaps, the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides. ~ Adrienne Rich

The story of Gavrila was told in seventy-two lines. At the end of the poem, the mailman Gavrila, wounded by a fascist's bullet, still manages to deliver the letter to its addressee.

"Where does the story take place?" he asked Lapis. It was a logical question. There are no fascists in the USSR, and there are no Gavrilas (members of the communications workers' union) abroad.

"What's the big deal?" Lapis said. "It takes place here, of course, and the fascist is in disguise. ~ Ilya Ilf

Names sound nice because no one peeks behind the cover to see the sad face of a poem crying for meaning, while the name of the creator proudly smiles from the title. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

A poem needs understaning through the senses. The point of diving in a lake, is not immediately to swim to the shore, but to be in the lake; to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out, it is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery. ~ John Keats

It wouldn't have to be sunny
It wouldn't have to be anything else then just that
It would really simplify my walk home at night,
where every thought I think is some contrived line I repeat over and over to myself
Words are always just replaced with new ones
The pictures would never need to know otherwise ~ Jackie Clark

Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem. ~ Maxine Hong Kingston

I'm always writing towards a discovery. When I'm writing poems in particular, I'm often writing because a few images coalesced in my mind and I thought, "I wonder why these images are abrading against each other. I wonder what happens if put them in a poem and explore them." I'm trying to learn something every time I write a poem. ~ Alison Hawthorne Deming