Nathicana Poem Quotes

When I'm constructing a poem, I'm trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a lot of the lines - some hold up better as lines than others. But I'm not thinking of just writing a paragraph and then chopping it up. ~ Billy Collins

And in the night, when the dog barks at shadows, tell him
not to be afraid of what he cannot see
or the things he does not yet understand.
There is mystery everywhere.
Beneath rocks, there is damp earth
and an army of ants
planning a revolution.

Esteban stood at the front of the room, staring at the page. Then he lifted his head and looked at us. We cheered again, even louder this time. I don't know if any of us really understood his dad's poem. But for a long time after he'd finished reading, I thought about that army of ants, how they were coming together.
Like us. ~ Jacqueline Woodson

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work. ~ Carl Sandburg

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things. ~ Rita Dove

It looked like a love poem, and I was jealous of whoever inspired the sort of devotion he must have felt to make those words so permanent ~ Tammara Webber

To what or whom does Lizzie Harris direct the imperative title of her startling first book, Stop Wanting? To the reader, the narrator, to desire itself, or to lack? This is a work of complexly, ambiguously layered narratives and identities. The opening poem asserts I want to say what happened / but am suspicious of stories. These lines become an ars poetica for the whole of this painful and exceptional collection in which the unspeakable is stubbornly confronted by a searing eloquence. This is a commanding debut. ~ Lynn Emanuel

Inside my head / or in a distant / Galaxy / Soft I hear it / Calling me." from the song "In the Blackness" in the poetry collection "Terra Affirmative". ~ Jay Woodman

We can't find the cat,
We don't know where she's at,
Oh, where did she go?
Does anyone know?
Let's ask this walking hat. ~ Shel Silverstein

The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading. ~ Edward Hirsch

What distinguishes a mathematical model from, say, a poem, a song, a portrait or any other kind of "model," is that the mathematical model is an image or picture of reality painted with logical symbols instead of with words, sounds or watercolors. ~ John L. Casti

It does not need that a poem should be long. Every word was once a poem. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

You, too, were supposed to be a one-night stand. A quick fix. A conquest. A ten-line poem in my grand anthology of lovers.
But you altered the narrative, you marked your territory on my timeline o that as I look back, I find I can neatly divide my more recent past into two unequal halves: before you and after. ~ Rosalyn D'Mello

And sometimes when I tilt my head,
in that deep sleep, I realize I forgot to tell you
what happened at work, in the thick of,
all other rubbish daily stuff.
And then I hate to believe, it's more than
5 hours to hit the snooze, and now suddenly
the night seems longer- than any lazy afternoon.
I want to talk to you now, before I forget
How I have imagined you will react, word by word,
And act by act.
But I kind of manage dozing off in a few minutes,
And I clearly forget it morning,
This entire instance.

But tonight- when you are asleep, and I am
Wide awake like a snake, I don't say I forgot any
Buzz to discuss, but I have this insane gush
Of words of tell you I how much I have loved you through.
Precisely none of this should be forgotten,
So I decide to write this poem and tell you,
I am so much in my moment of truth. ~ Jasleen Kaur Gumber

It Rained for Two Days Straight

Yesterday, Ryan told me his grandfather was admitted to the hospital. It was raining the way it rains in the movies, like whoever does the dishes left the faucet running, heavy drops polishing everything in the city dark. We ran from one drooling awning to the next, quicker, then slower, quicker, slower. If one had watched from the sky, our bodies would have looked like two small needles being pulsed forward by some invisible machine, stitching the streets together. Today, Patric was left by a girl he did not love but did not not love. He told me it was impossible to imagine himself both alone and whole. It was still raining--the sky's silly metaphor for sadness, untimely, startling, the way it makes the whole world more honest. Death is like this, too. Heartache, also. The sudden absence of what was there but now not. I touched Patrick's shoulder, attempting to pass my human to his. I sent Ryan a poem. I cannot do more than this art of bearing witness, to be both the bucket and the mirror, to say, yes, you are here but I am here also, to say you won't be here forever, or to say nothing and just walk beside each other in the rain. ~ Sierra DeMulder

... but I love language. It is a living, breathing, evolving thing, and language has power. Whether in a song lyric, a poem, a speech, or a simple conversation, we've all experienced words that resonate with us. They may make us recall a powerful moment, inspire us, move us, or perhaps, comfort us…. But at the same time, we don't think in words. We think in pictures. If I say the word 'dog' to you, you aren't picturing the letters, d-o-g, you're picturing a dog from your memory... ~ Lily Velden

There's a poem by Adrienne Rich I first read twenty years ago called "Splittings" that I thought of when I read your letter. The last two lines of the poem are: "I choose to love this time fore once / with all my intelligence. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Then read from the treasured volume the poem of thy choice, and lend to the rhyme of the poet the beauty of thy voice. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A poem without metaphor is a gelding; useless to nightmares. ~ David Joseph Cribbin

Let us dismiss, as irrelevant to the poem per se, the circumstance ... which, in the first place, gave rise to the intention of composing a poem that should suit at once the popular and the critical taste. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

The hardest step we all must take is blindly trust in who we are. ~ Atticus Poetry

Then winter ended and spring came, and I thought, even if I don't believe there's a poem in anything anymore, maybe I'll write a story. A lot of people do that when they can't seem to figure out who or what they love. It might be an oversimplification, but they seem to write poetry when they do know. ~ Jennifer Egan

... and that's why they leave, isn't it? Because they have to see themselves in the context of something larger than just the two of them. It's like that Faiz poem, you know, mujh say pehli si muhabat, when you've seen the sorrows of the rest of the world you can't go on pretending none of it matters, you can't pretend two people can really live in isolation telling themselves their love is all that matters in the world. And that two of them, when they come back to the city, that's when they find out that their love was imperfect because it couldn't bear the knowledge of everything that lies outside ... ~ Kamila Shamsie

Even when the lights go out, even when someone says to me: "It's over---," even when from the stage a gray gust of emptiness drifts toward me,
even when not one silent ancestor sits beside me anymore---not a woman, not even the boy with the brown squint-eye:
I'll sit here anyway. One can always watch. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Eyes and ears are two.
Lungs and kidneys, too.
I wonder then
why we're born with one
heart that skips a beat when hay is here,
and beats quickly when you are near.
One heart that cracks when you are far,
lie to me and leave a scar.
I wonder then
why we're born with one
heart that gets broken.
Was I supposed to find you then?
So your heart would make one
plus one is
two
for me and
two for you. ~ Kamand Kojouri

Get in first and shape the terms. He did so in quick short sentences, his smooth tenor's voice as clear and precise as it was when he sang Goethe's tragic poem. ~ Ian McEwan

Did you wish upon a star and take the time to try to make your wish come true?
Did you try to paint the sunrise and find the gift of life within?
Did you write a song just for the joy of it?
Or write a poem just to feel the pain?
Did you find a reason to ignore the petty injustices, the spoken barbs, or the envies, jealousies and greed that crossed your path?
Did you wake up this morning and whisper inside, "Today, I'll find every reason to smile, and ignore the excuses to frown."
Today will be the day I'll whisper nothing snide, I'll say nothing cruel. I'll be kind to my enemy, I'll embrace my friends, and for this
one day, I'll forget the slights of the past.
Today will be the day I'll live for the joy of it, laugh for the fun of it, and today, I'll love whether it's returned, forsaken, or simply
ignored.
And if you did, then your heart has joined the others who have as well, uniting, strengthening, and in a single heartbeat you've created
a world of hope. ~ Lora Leigh

Each new poem is partly propelled by the formal energies of all the poems that have preceded it in the history of literature. ~ May Sarton

Have endless patterns and repetitions accompanying your thoughtlessness, as if to say let go of that other more linear story, with its beginning, middle, and end, with its transcendent end, let go, we are the poem, we have come miles of life, we have survived this far to tell you, go on, go on. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

To dissect a poem as if it were a system is a crime, even a sacrilege. ~ Emil M. Cioran

The air was steeped with the heady fragrance of roses, as if the entire hall had been rinsed with expensive perfume.
"Good Lord!" she exclaimed, stopping short at the sight of massive bunches of flowers being brought in from a cart outside. Mountains of white roses, some of them tightly furled buds, some in glorious full bloom. Two footmen had been recruited to assist the driver of the cart, and the three of them kept going outside to fetch bouquet after bouquet wrapped in stiff white lace paper.
"Fifteen dozen of them," Marcus said brusquely. "I doubt there's a single white rose left in London."
Aline could not believe how fast her heart was beating. Slowly she moved forward and drew a single rose from one of the bouquets. Cupping the delicate bowl of the blossom with her fingers, she bent her head to inhale its lavish perfume. Its petals were a cool brush of silk against her cheek.
"There's something else," Marcus said.
Following his gaze, Aline saw the butler directing yet another footman to pry open a huge crate filled with brick-sized parcels wrapped in brown paper. "What are they, Salter?"
"With your permission, my lady, I will find out." The elderly butler unwrapped one of the parcels with great care. He spread the waxed brown paper open to reveal a damply fragrant loaf of gingerbread, its spice adding a pungent note to the smell of the roses.
Aline put her hand over her mouth to contain a bubbling laugh, while some undefinable emotio ~ Lisa Kleypas

They held each other close and turned their backs upon the end.
The hills that split asunder and the black that ate the skies;
The flames that shot so high and hot that even dragons burned;
Would never be the final sights that fell upon their eyes.
A fly upon a wall, the waves the sea wind whipped and churned -
The city of a thousand years, and all that men had learned;
The Doom consumed it all alike, and neither of them turned"
―Tyrion Lannister and Jorah Mormont, quoting a poem about the Doom ~ George R.R. Martin

It was early on in 1965 when I wrote some of my first poems. I sent a poem to 'Harper's' magazine because they paid a dollar a line. I had an eighteen-line poem, and just as I was putting it into the envelope, I stopped and decided to make it a thirty-six-line poem. It seemed like the poem came back the next day: no letter, nothing. ~ August Wilson

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The first test any poem must pass is no longer, 'Is it true to nature?' but a criterion looking in a different direction: namely, 'Is it sincere? Is it genuine?' ~ M.H. Abrams

We'd all like to see our poems walking alone in the world. Like children reared to be independent adults. Some parents raise a child conservatively (that is, with no exposure to the darker things awaiting them beyond the door), but you can see how that's a mistake right? There's no way to know how best to prepare a child for the future. No way to know how to write a publishable poem -- I'm not saying safe poems don't get published. Or that sheltered children can't succeed. Just that you write the best poems you can and send them out. Sometimes they return home weeping. Sometimes they make their own way. ~ Terrence K. Hayes

Then her face tilted up to his, and he was looking into her eyes again. He had heard of drowning in a woman's eyes in some poem or story, and thought it ridiculous. He still thought it ridiculous, but understood it was perfectly possible, nonetheless. And she knew it. He saw concern in her eyes, perhaps even fear. ~ Stephen King

Alexandria was "the single place on earth where all the knowledge in the entire world was gathered together -- every great play and poem, every book of physics and philosophy, the key to understanding ... simply everything," as the historians Justin Pollard and Howard Reid wrote. "Most of the knowledge of the first thousand years of Western civilization is missing. These were the books that formed the library of Alexandria. ~ Adam Rogers

Sensuality isn't worth a hair more than spirituality, and it's the same the other way around. It's all one, everything is equally good. Whether you embrace a woman or make a poem, it's the same. So long as the main thing is there, the love, the burning, the emotion, it doesn't matter whether you are a monk on Mount Athos or a man about town in Paris. ~ Hermann Hesse

But most men regard their life as a poem that women threaten. They may not have two spondees to rub together but they still want to pen their saga untrammelled by life-threatening activities like trailing round Sainsbury's, emptying the dishwasher or going to the nativity play. ~ Alan Bennett

When love is sweet, the sweetness means its light
And light may keep the truth, when love is pure.
But love is bitter, when it turns to fight.
Lovers in a fight are quite immature.'
From the poem 'A Note on Existentialist Love ~ Marieta Maglas

It takes a spasm of love to write a poem. ~ Erica Jong

What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise. ~ Louise Gluck

The Poem About Taking out the Trash

In the vast emptiness of darkness,
Stars are being born and are burning out;
Galaxies expand, into what I have no idea,
And dark matter fills the infinite space
That has no bounds and no limits.
In the middle of all this, I stand
In a single moment and know how small I am.
A group of atoms, the size of nothing in comparison.
I am the observer of the play on a tiny stage.
The onlooker who watches the painting
Of a picture that few stop to see.
The listener of a song where I hear only a fraction
Of a fraction of a note in a song that will be forever sung
And that has been being sung for eternity upon eternity,
Before I knew breath and sound.
I am but dust, stardust, a breath of a life, smoke
Rising into oblivion, here then gone as quickly.
Under all of this, I take out the trash. ~ Eric Overby