Feminist Poetry Quotes

& besides, I don't
design my smiles to be nets because I'm not fishing ~ Roseanna Boswell

she burned flames and drowned oceans ~ R.H. Sin

female

i hope the future really is you
not soft, but softer,
alternative mainstreamed left sided divinely
feminine.
a woman is a man with a whoa.
exponentially deeper internal seas,
wish i had a submarine
to explore your ocean floors.
smarter because she has to be
vulnerable empathy with force,
taught remorseful but she has nothing to
apologize for, she deserves the sorriest.
everything comes first from you
every single one born from them
by me she is love, loved, loving
in the origin of power,
you are who i try to be,
feminist.
you
wondered woman,
wonderful you. ~ Nico Tortorella

So, I show my uncovered scars
with a sense of pride.
Damn you and damn me.
If we cross swords, neither of us will survive. ~ Anne Fall

Women who focus on style over substance usually find themselves in a big fucking hole, with other men who want to fuck the hole. Oh so smooth, and none sophistacted. Because, you know, how sophisticated can hole-fucking really be ~ Emilie Autumn

Poetry is an attempt to penetrate the dense reality to find a place where the simplest things look as new as through the eyes of a child. ~ Czeslaw Milosz

Using one's beauty was the only way a smart girl could get by, at least that's how it was back then, though even for a smart girl there were really only three professions. You could be a nurse or a teacher or a wife. ~ Shannon Celebi

The great liberal betrayal of this generation is that in the name of liberalism, communal rights have been prioritized over individual autonomy within minority groups. And minorities within minorities really do suffer because of this betrayal. The people I really worry about when we have this conversation are feminist Muslims, gay Muslims, ex-Muslims - all the vulnerable and bullied individuals who are not just stigmatized but in many cases violently assaulted or killed merely for being against the norm. ~ Maajid Nawaz

There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power. ~ Eugenio Montale

What bothers me most about my teeth is that they don't travel loin south, don't sprout from the Mother Mouth. Vagina dentata, come closah, say high. ~ Virginia Petrucci

The garden was full of sorrow
Songbirds and unusual winds whistled a rhyme
Clouds caused to appear and cast down darkness
For this was the first day the sun didn't shine ~ John E. Wordslinger

He had a sensitive drained face
the face of a small boy lost on the Fairgrounds
after everyone has gone home. ~ Robert Nichols

When I see the elaborate study and ingenuity displayed by women in the pursuit of trifles, I feel no doubt of their capacity for the most herculean undertakings. ~ Julia Ward Howe

Where the mountain crosses.
On top of the mountain, I do not myself know where.
I wandered where my mind and my heart seemed to be lost.
I wandered away. ~ Jane Bierhorst

The break-hard
determination to
be a good person,
what happened
to that? How
is it true
I have to
go now? She's lost
my name, but the
occasion of my
presence begs
more. Who is my
mother now I am
unspoken for? ~ Forrest Gander

And I saw it didn't matter
who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone.
The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty
of the Iranian attendant, the thickening
clouds
nothing was mine. And I understood
finally, after a semester of philosophy,
a thousand books of poetry, after death
and childbirth and the startled cries of men
who called out my name as they entered me,
I finally believed I was alone, felt it
in my actual, visceral heart, heard it echo
like a thin bell. ~ Dorianne Laux

(They) have killed off that part of themselves which feels,
Which cannot look away, which brings them trembling to their knees,
at the wet-faced beauty of each instant,,,
They deftly slip the punches that life throws at their head as it screams
"Look at me! Feel me! Why did you even come here? ~ Caitlin Johnstone

Mediocrity in poets has never been tolerated by either men, or gods, or booksellers. ~ Horace

Tiny Giggles
Silly giggles of laughter
I store upon a shelf
I give some to other
I save some for myself
I am rich beyond all measure
Though not with worldly wealth
I store up these treasures
For my heart and soulful health. ~ Muse

I actually chafe at describing myself as masculine. For one thing, masculinity itself is such an expansive territory, encompassing boundaries of nationality, race, and class. Most importantly, individuals blaze their own trails across this landscape. And it's hard for me to label the intricate matrix of my gender as simply masculine.

To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write. ~ Leslie Feinberg

The large blue unknown berry
tastes medicinal.
Am I poisoned? ~ Joanna McClure

When a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents through him. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

i get lost in my head sometimes
tangled in my thoughts.
it took me years to lose touch with reality
to realize there is no reality.

our thoughts rule our lives.
we have become addicted to our thoughts.
we feel the need to occupy ourselves
and think of more thoughts
to avoid the feeling of boredom;
to avoid being alone with ourselves. ~ Incognito .

My child
Your tears
We cannot bear

My child
You are so full of laughter
And it's our greatest power ~ Jyoti Patel

A Hard Life With Memory

I'm a poor audience for my memory.
She wants me to attend her voice nonstop,
but I fidget, fuss,
listen and don't,
step out, come back, then leave again.

She wants all my time and attention.
She's got no problem when I sleep.
The day's a different matter, which upsets her.

She thrusts old letters, snapshots at me eagerly,
stirs up events both important and un-,
turns my eyes to overlooked views,
peoples them with my dead.

In her stories I'm always younger.
Which is nice, but why always the same story.
Every mirror holds different news for me.

She gets angry when I shrug my shoulders.
And takes revenge by hauling out old errors,
weighty, but easily forgotten.
Looks into my eyes, checks my reaction.
Then comforts me, it could be worse.

She wants me to live only for her and with her.
Ideally in a dark, locked room,
but my plans still feature today's sun,
clouds in progress, ongoing roads.

At times I get fed up with her.
I suggest a separation. From now to eternity.
Then she smiles at me with pity,
since she knows it would be the end of me too. ~ Wisława Szymborska

You become courageous by doing courageous acts ... Courage is a habit. ~ Mary Daly

Man is no form no mighty molecule no just
idea alone - all that Thing -
I feel man tender radiance at Heart between
breast and belly, that physical place
where the Self urges - delicate sensation ~ Allen Ginsberg

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there. ~ Wallace Stevens

I am strange;
I show different things;
So please
Don't think I don't love you
Because the truth
Is the opposite ~ Jazalyn

But the hidden meaning of life is that life has no hidden meaning. Abel knew Pessoa's poetry well. ~ Jose Saramago

The idea that a student can write a sonnet or a novel without having a sound understanding about its history, and where it fits into literature as a whole, seems to me to be manifestly daft. ~ Nicholas Royle

Words are powerful. Words make a difference. They can create and destroy. They can open doors and close doors. Words can create illusion or magic, love or destruction. ... All those things. ~ R.M. Engelhardt

Touch has a memory," Will. Your man Keats said that.

Did he, now? Will looked up.

He did. If it had fit into his poem, I think he would have said taste and smell and sound have a memory, too.

Say more.

What more is there to say? He said what I've been saying. Aesthetics matter. Place matters. Our senses remember and replay these things back to us, to our fingers, or our nostrils, or our tongues."

(Conversation between Will and Joe.) ~ Will Willingham

During the feminist seventies men were caught between a rock and a hard-on; in the fathering eighties they are caught between good hugs and bad hugs. ~ Florence King

All too frequently in the women's movement it was assumed one could be free of sexist thinking by simply adopting the appropriate feminist rhetoric; it was further assumed that identifying oneself as oppressed freed one from being an oppressor. To a very grave extent such thinking prevented white feminists from understanding and overcoming their own sexist-racist attitudes toward black women. They could pay lip-service to the idea of sisterhood and solidarity between women but at the same time dismiss black women. Just ~ Bell Hooks

Renaissance Humanism, which under Petrarch's formation and tutelage vindicated the importance of poetry and rhetoric as effectors of an intimate bond between reason and emotion, thought and action, intellect and will. Petrarchan Humanism became the historical force mobilizing thought and letters against the blind impulsiveness of an illusory popular culture and the elitism of the philosophical schools" (Trinkaus, 135). ~ Charles Edward Trinkaus

Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, to-day's civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day. ~ Henry Beston

Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry. ~ Terry Eagleton

For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer ... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts. ~ Jess Walter

My father lost me to the Beast at cards ~ Angela Carter

There Will Come Soft Rains
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pool singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone. ~ Sara Teasdale

The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs. ~ Philip Larkin

Love's the only thing I've thought of or read about since I was knee-high. That's what I always dreamed of, of meeting somebody and falling in love. And when that remarkable thing happened, I was going to recite poetry to her for hours about how her heart's an angel's wing and her hair the strings of a heavenly harp. Instead I got drunk and hollered at her and called her a harpy. ~ Ben Hecht

Sufism is the reconciliation of all opposites: the outer and the inner, the material and the spiritual, the finite and the infinite, the here and the hereafter, freedom and servanthood, the human and the divine. Enlightenment in this tradition does not prevent us from functioning in a practical and humble way in life, does not entitle us to special treatment, does not exclude us from the inevitable joys and griefs of life. The Sufi's union with God does not cancel servanthood. What I found through Sufism far exceeded my hopes. As an example, one poet said to me: "All of my reading, study, and creative writing could not have prepared me for the poetry of Rumi." And yet all Rumi's poetry is just the wave on the surface of the ocean of Sufi spirituality. Perhaps it is consistent with the idea of Divine generosity that it should exceed in actuality the gift we had foreseen in our imagination. The Source is not only infinitely generous, it is infinitely creative, and its gifts surpass human imagination. ~ Kabir Edmund Helminski

I owe my discovery of the Hot Club of Cowtown to Kinky Friedman, leader of the Texas Jewboys. When I saw that Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys were headlining the 2003 Santa Clarita Cowboy Poetry and Music Festival, I thought it my duty to check out the band that had inspired the Texas Jewboys. ~ Clive Sinclair

The profession of magician, is one of the most perilous and arduous specializations of the imagination. On the one hand there is the hostility of God and the police to be guarded against; on the other it is as difficult as music, as deep as poetry, as ingenious as stage-craft, as nervous as the manufacture of high explosives, and as delicate as the trade in narcotics. ~ William Bolitho

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine. ~ Marianne Moore

I write poems. I'm often laughed at for doing so. My friends and foes, who were born in 1980's or even later aren't savvy with this concept of the reading and writing poems. They're probably not at fault because while they were being brought up in their respective environments, they weren't really taught how to appreciate poetry. Sadly, those same indifferent souls are now raising their children in the same robotic way, keeping them away from an art form as pure as poetry. Anyway, on the path my life, my poems, written and unwritten, are spread throughout like breadcrumbs. Alas! I'm savouring these breadcrumbs alone because no one has chosen to walk by me, maybe because they're skeptic about the taste of these crumbs. They've hypothetically assumed that these crumbs, these poems are bitter. Sigh! They aren't courageous enough to gather the strength to actually taste them. Perhaps this way, the real sweetness of my crumbs, of my poems stays obscured to them. But I haven't let them crush this sweetness beneath their feet and that's why, I've chosen to walk alone instead. How can I not savour these crumbs if I already know that they're leading me to the apex of my life? How can I not write poems if a voice inside me is constantly pecking my hands to give it a form? This voice is my meditation. This voice is my shadow, a shadow which is stubborn enough to remain intact even when I'll be gone. This voice is my concrete, the concrete that I'm made up of. This voice is my power, the ~ Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal

She was, in short, melted by his distress, as so often happens with the female sex. Poets have frequently commented on this. You are probably familiar with the one who said, Oh, woman in our hours of ease tum tumty tiddly something please, when something something something brow, a something something something thou. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

Thus I fled, ridiculous hairy creature torn apart by poetry ~ John Gardner

For a lot of people, well-meaning teaching has made poetry seem arcane, difficult, a kind of brown-knotting medicine that might be good for you but doesn't taste so good. So I tried to make a collection of poetry that would be fun. And that would bring out poetry as an art, rather than the challenge to say smart things. ~ Robert Pinsky

The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it's the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it's a failure in communication. ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

….unable to find a title for her last published novel, she wrote six lines which included her eventual title The Birds Fall Down. These lines were attributed to Conway Power (the name she generally appended to her poetry, even in her private notebooks), from a non-existent poem called 'Guide to a Disturbed Planet.' When the novel was published she had fun deflecting the enquiries of readers who wanted to know how to find the works of Conway Power. One was told a long story: Conway Power was a landowner in a remote area who had written thousands of poems and destroyed most of them. He had left some of them with her, given his property to a nephew, and gone abroad. 'If I can trace the book (if there is a book) I'll let you know. ~ Victoria Glendinning