Neothomist Poem Quotes

The Lord is my shepherd
I shall not want him for long
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures
and there are no green pastures
He leadeth me beside still waters
and still waters run deep ~ Ernest Hemingway,

After hours of wearing stifling suits while seated on rigid pews and high-backed dining chairs, to enter water and splay our limbs was freeing. The midday sun fell full on the pool, so when we waded in up to our waists, heat and cold balanced as if by a carpenter's level. That was the best sensation, knowing in a moment, but not quite yet, I'd dive into cold but emerge into warmth. Years later at Wake Forest, when I still believed I might create literature, I'd write a mediocre poem about those mornings in church and afterward the 'baptism of nature. ~ Ron Rash

I do know I can lie awake all night and it feels as if someone is cutting out my stomach the pain of having lost her is so awful. And I am angry that I was made to choose, that both Fen & Helen needed me to choose, to be their one & only when I didn't want a one & only. I loved that Amy Lowell poem when I first read it, how her lover was like red wine at the beginning and then became bread. But that has not happened to me. My loves remain wine to me, yet I become too quickly bread to them. It was unfair, the way I had to decide one way or another in Marseille. Perhaps I made the conventional choice, the easy way for my work, my reputation, and of course for a child. A child that does not come. ~ Lily King

I always feel that whatever isn't necessary shouldn't be in a poem. ~ Mary Oliver

An experienced reader uses the poem as an agent of inquiry. This makes poetry very exciting, unstable, and interactive. ~ John Barton

Theology is
or should be
a species of poetry,which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way you might listen to a difficult piece of music ... If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its inviolate holiness. ~ Karen Armstrong

It is clear that a poem may be improperly brief. Undue brevity degenerates into mere epigrammatism. A very short poem, while now and then producing a brilliant or vivid, never produces a profound or enduring, effect. There must be the steady pressing down of the stamp upon the wax. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

To Feel
The weight of death, the weight of fear,
the burden of stress, pain is here.
Never to know, never to guess.
Never to know, how much the mess
Do not show care,
do not feel joy,
do not have love,
life's not a toy
and yet we feel,
we have,
we show,
who knows ...
I do not know.
I do not know.
(2007) September 9 ~ Esther Earl

Ashryver eyes.
The fairest eyes, from legends old
of brightest, ringed with gold. ~ Sarah J. Maas

Every poem is shadowed by desire, but it is also shadowed by the problem of rendering desire in language. There is a place where similitude seems to break down because experience itself seems beyond compare. ~ Edward Hirsch

In India when I was a boy they had great big green lizards there, and if you shouted or shot them their tails would fall off. There was only one boy in the school who could catch lizards intact. No one knew quite how he did it. He had a special soft way of going up to them, and he'd bring them back with their tails on. That strikes me as the best analogy I can give you. To try and catch your poem without its tail falling off. ~ Lawrence Durrell

For me, form is something I locate in the process of writing the poems. What I mean is, I start scribbling, and then try to form the poem - on a typewriter or on my computer - and, by trial and error, try to find the right shape. I just try to keep forming the poem in different ways until it feels right to me. ~ Matthew Zapruder

If we cannot leave something tangible behind - such as a gene or a poem - perhaps it is enough if we just make the world a little better? You can help somebody, and that somebody will subsequently help somebody else, and you thereby contribute to the overall improvement of the world, and constitute a small link in the great chain of kindness. Though it has its merits, the great chain of happiness is a bit like the great chain of turtles - it is far from clear where its meaning comes from. A wise old man was asked what he learned about the meaning of life. 'Well,' he answered, 'I have learned that I am here on earth in order to help other people. What I still haven't figured out is why the other people are here. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it. ~ Philip Levine

The book as a structure is the Trojan horse of art - it is not feared by average people. It is a familiar form in the world, and average people will take it from you and examine it whereas a painting, poem, sculpture, or print they will not. ~ Walter Hamady

I carry the weight of my emptiness, And see the world through eyes of needs, These needs breeds more habits, And these habits preserve my loneliness… ~ Piyush Rohankar

Mantra to Overcome Depression

Vitamin D. Sunlight. Go
outside. Get a good night

of sleep. Not too good.

Not shades drawn forever
good. Not like you used to.

Open the windows.

Buy more houseplants.
Breathe. Meditate. One day,

you will no longer be

afraid of being alone
with your thoughts.

Exercise. Actually exercise

instead of just Googling it.
Eat well. Cook for yourself.

Organize your closet, the

garage. Drink plenty of
water and repeat after me:

I am not a problem

to be solved. Repeat after me:
I am worthy I am worthy

I am neither the mistake nor

the punishment. Forget to take
vitamins. Let the houseplant die.

Eat spoonfuls of peanut butter.

Shave your head. Forget
this poem. It doesn't matter.

There is no wrong way

to remember the grace of your
own body; no choice

that can unmake itself.

There is only now, here
look: you are already

forgiven. ~ Sierra DeMulder

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death's bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides ... High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps. ~ Hart Crane

We are always ourselves, no matter where we go. That's what the poem is saying, I think. We have to recognize it, and make what we can here. This world, great as it is, is only just another biome we have to live in. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

I'm interested in connecting with readers and strangers through poetry. I want to create real intimacy with my poems. Whether I do that through pulling from my personal life or using my fantasy life - or say history, whether that history is personal history or our collective histories - what's important is that an experience is created. An experience that will hopefully matter to people and feel real. I want my poems to move people and make them want to live their lives, however complicated and impossible those lives may be. I think a poem can speak to the life you currently live but also to the lives you've lived before, the ones to come and also those you've yet to imagine. What else can do that? Not sex or money or other people. ~ Alex Dimitrov

I can remember, I think it was 1967, sitting in the First Unitarian Church in Isla Vista, Santa Barbara, and seeing Phil Levine come out on the little stage. He sat on the edge and said, "You know, sometimes it's hard not to hate my country for the way I feel, at times, but I won't let that happen." And then he read, "They Feed They Lion," this incredibly powerful, incantatory poem that was inspired in part by the burning of Detroit in 1967 and the riots that followed. ~ Sam Hamill

I am a poem in progress
with no clear beginning or ending
just a middle
untended, unintended,
unfinished, hanging there
like the breath before a question ~ Jen Lynn Anderson

Vores's settings fit Torgove's voice like a knife's sheath; they are alert to the harmony of every poem and to every shift of tonality within. ~ Richard Dyer

teach us
equality through empathy ~ Michelle Frost

It's all the same. Don't you see? The Beast, the Bog, the Poem, the Poet, the world. They all love you. They've loved you this whole time. ~ Kelly Barnhill

Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself. ~ Seamus Heaney

It is raining! In other words little poems are coming down from the sky! Nature is literature! Sun is a fable; forest is a story; birds are a theatre; mountains are a myth; rain is a poem! Nature is literature! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Being president is as difficult as writing the perfect poem. And being president is as effortless as writing the perfect poem. Always a Reckoning, my first collection of poetry, was described by Booklist as 'keenly evocative.' ~ Jimmy Carter

The other gift - a book of poems, called, "The Cowardly Morning" - Waner put on Corinne's desk at the office, with a note saying, "This man is Coleridge and Blake and Rilke all in one, and more."
She didn't pick up the book again until she was in bed, late that night.
[...]
The first poem was the title poem. This time Corinne read it through aloud. But still she didn't hear it. She read it through a third time, and heard some of it. She read it through a fourth time, and heard all of it. It was the poem containing the lines:
'Not wasteland, but a great inverted forest
with all foliage underground.'
As though it might be best to look immediately for shelter, Corinne had to put the book down. At any moment the apartment building seemed liable to lose its balance and topple across Fifth Avenue into Central Park. She waited. Gradually the deluge of truth and beauty abated.
- The Inverted Forest (1947) ~ J.D. Salinger

I never wish to celebrate
The year of my birth,
For fear lest I wake,
By the clinking of glasses and noisy mirth,
All those who sleep in memory's vaults. ~ Isa Ismayilzade

What makes a poem a poem, finally, is that it is unparaphrasable. There is no other way to say exactly this; it exists only in its own body of language, only in these words. I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing.
It's the same with painting. All I can say of still life must finally fall short; I may inventory, weigh, suggest, but I cannot circumscribe; some element of mystery will always be left out. What is missing is, precisely, its poetry. ~ Mark Doty

Roads Go Ever On

Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains in the moon.

Roads go ever ever on,
Under cloud and under star.
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen,
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green,
And trees and hills they long have known.

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with weary feet,
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone.
Let others follow, if they can!
Let them a journey new begin.
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet's company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student's concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism.

The poet nodded his big head in a sympathetic, rhythmic way as this was explained to him, then told him that there are two kinds of poems. There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars. Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it's fatal to confuse them.

In the Seventh Saint, many years later, it had struck him that the difference between himself and Shakespeare wasn't talent - not especially - but nerve. The capacity not to be frightened by his largest and most potent conceptions, to simply (simply!) sit down and execute them. The dreadful lassitude he felt when something really large and multifarious came suddenly clear to him, something Lear-sized yet sonnet-precise. If only they didn't rush on him whole, all at once, massive and perfect, leaving him frightened and nerveless at the prospect of articulating them word by scene by page. He would try to believe they were of the kind told in bars, not the kind to be ~ John Crowley

I'm trying to find these rare moments where you feel completely illuminated. Facts never illuminate you. The phone directory of Manhattan doesn't illuminate you, although it has factually correct entries, millions of them. But these rare moments of illumination that you find when you read a great poem, you instantly know. You instantly feel this spark of illumination. You are almost stepping outside of yourself and you see something sublime. ~ Werner Herzog

A lot of my poems are about how ill I am and how I probably won't live beyond next week. I publish a poem and everyone says 'cluck cluck, how wonderful, how brave', but then embarrassingly I'm still here! You see the problem? ~ Clive James

I've always felt, with 'The Iliad,' a real frustration that it's read wrong. That it's turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes - it's become a cliched, British empire part of our culture. ~ Alice Oswald

The poem of the world is uninterrupted, but few are the ears that hear it. ~ Henry David Thoreau

We have never understood how birds manage to fly,
Nor who the genius is who makes up dreams,
Now how heaven and earth can appear in a poem. ~ Robert Bly

You tried to eradicate me using your might,

But I am going to live on ... out of spite.

Will wait in the shadows ever so slight,

And ... when the time is right,

Ruin your whole life, like a pestering blight. ~ Shon Mehta

If a muscleman like Hukum can write a poem, everyone can. ~ Pawan Mishra

An unromantic poem I mean to make, of one who only lives for duty's sake. ~ Henrik Ibsen

I lure myself into a spandex trap and I text Amanda, "Is this what death feels like?" Alone in my room I say, "God, is this a poem? It's uncomfortable. It feels like a poem." God never answers, which is what really makes it poetry. ~ Nikita Gill

Ms. Whitlock is lost in her own world as she continues babbling about poem interpretations and people who died too long ago. ~ Katie McGarry

...It's not that the worm forgives the plough; it gives it no mind. (Pain occurs, in passing.) (lines 37-39 in the poem 'Fantasia on a Theme from IKEA') ~ Philip Gross

This is why I love poems: they require me to sit still, listen deeply, and imagine putting myself in someone else's unfamiliar shoes. The world I return to when the poem is over seems fuller and more comprehensible as a result. ~ Tracy K. Smith

For the last four years of her life, Mother was in a nursing home called Chateins in St. Louis ... [S]ix months before she died I sent a Mother's Day card. There was a horrible, mushy poem in it. I remember feeling vaguely guilty. ~ William S. Burroughs