Newcastle Poet Quotes

God help us
you full of talk of a city called Edinburgh
and me in silence so very deep we were so very much in love.

And the burns and sikes and streams
though shallow
were deep music to us.
You trout-tickler,
you flower-picker,
climber in willow trees, me laughing below

as best I could laugh, though you never thought it ugly.
Indeed the word you used was the word beautiful,
pinning cowslips behind my ears,

you patting and running fingers through our
beckwashed hair.
Lying by the marigold beds
bare toes entwined, then dancing under branches
before the elms ever died. But our mutual hearts never did.

Bar it is 7 and your raining rage
must cease
under my morning moon.
In my dawn shawl looking dawndown upon you
in your foot-striding fellhighhighupuptopheavyrainbeatingrainrain.
We have always walked together so long.
In the long grass we walked and walked forever so long so very language long
and I could say so once you had the slate in my lap.

My tongue blank - FOREVER, word we wrote on a slate, remember
when you taught me? - only my hands and eyes moving now - two
daughters we could have had -

but I am looking kindly and lovingly on you
'Please do it'
- cool your raging fire lovelorn heart - for me.

And love me - forever. ~ Barry MacSweeney

"Work" does not exist in a nonliterate world. The primitive hunter or fisherman did no work, any more than does the poet, painter, or thinker of today. Where the whole man is involved there is no work. ~ Marshall McLuhan

to be a poet means
to live
with a permanent wound

forever
susceptible
to either

the shade
of the sky

or someone's eyes. ~ Sanober Khan

The gaze of nature thus awakened dreams and pulls the poet after it. ~ Walter Benjamin

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. So medicine, law, business, engineering... these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love... these are what we stay alive for. ~ Walt Whitman

If I could write the beauty of your eyes And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say, 'This poet lies; Such heavenly touches ne'er touch'd earthly faces.' ~ William Shakespeare

The great poet draws his creations only from out of his own reality. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I am an ordinary human being who is impelled to write poetry ... I still do feel that a poet has a duty to words, and that words can do wonderful things, and it's too bad to just let them lie there without doing anything with and for them. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

The poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote in 1953 that 'only in the middle of the twentieth century did the inhabitants of many European countries come to understand, usually by way of suffering, that complex and difficult philosophy books have a direct influence on their fate. ~ Timothy Snyder

There is an old Latin quotation in regard to the poet which says 'Poeta nascitur non fit' the translation of which is - the poet is born, not made. ~ Joseph Devlin

I'm a poet first and foremost, before the modelling. ~ Jessica White

And when you think about it, poets always want us to be moved by something, until in the end, you begin to suspect a poet is someone who is moved by everything, who just stands in front of the world and weeps and laughs and laughs and weeps (the mysteries, said Aristotle, are the saying of many ridiculous and many serious things). ~ Mary Ruefle

this lightness is something created in the writing, using the linguistic tools of the poet, independent of whatever philosophical doctrine the poet claims to be following. ~ Italo Calvino

Art in order to move you has to be political or sexual - whether it is on canvas, in the drum of the cello, in the words of the poet. If it doesn't move you, what is the point? And if it does move you, what is the point? The point is to touch your senses, your soul. To carve, as a knife in the right hands, carves beauty from a block of wood. ~ Chloe Thurlow

There are many pressures to quiet the text, to silence this deposit of dangerous speech, to halt this outrageous practice of speaking alternative possibility. The poems, however, refuse such silence. They will sound. They sound through preachers who risk beyond prose. In the act of such risk, power is released, newness is evoked, God is praised. People are "speeched" to begin again. Such new possibility is offered in daring speech. Each time that happens, "finally comes the poet"-finally. ~ Walter Brueggemann

Blaisedell, the poet, had said to him, 'You love beer so much. I'll bet some day you'll go in and order a beer milk shake.' It was a simple piece of foolery but it had bothered Doc ever since. He wondered what a beer milk shake would taste like. The idea gagged him but he couldn't let it alone. It cropped up every time he had a glass of beer. Would it curdle the milk? Would you add sugar? It was like a shrimp ice cream. Once the thing got into your head you couldn't forget it ... If a man ordered a beer milk shake, he thought, he'd better do it in a town where he wasn't known. But then, a man with a beard, ordering a beer milk shake in a town where he wasn't known
they might call the police. ~ John Steinbeck

I'm A Queer Poet Too! She stressed queer not because she walked around identifying as a queer poet but so that the youth understood she would fuck her. ~ Michelle Tea

What poetry does above all else is develop sensibility. And that's what makes poetry so dangerous. That's why poetry is so good at undermining governments and so bad at building them. There's nothing harder to organize than a group of poets. ~ Sam Hamill

The Poet who could merely sit on a chair, and compose stanzas, would never make a stanza worth much. He could not sing the Heroic warrior, unless he himself were at least a Heroic warrior too. ~ Thomas Carlyle

You want to be a poet and you're not. By the time you realize you're not doomed, your life is going to be over and you'll never have taken any risks. ~ Tarryn Fisher

By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency. ~ William Carlos Williams

A poet has to be a bit childlike at heart, and in that sense all the romantic stereotypes about poets being "eternal children", etc, are all accurate. They believe, whatever they may say, that art and words can change the world. ~ John Thomas Allen

What is needed is the imagination of the poet and the reasoning power of the mathematician. The thief of "The Purloined Letter" successfully hides the letter from the police because he is both a poet and a mathematician. Dupin is able to find it because he too meets both conditions. ~ Vincent Buranelli

The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it. ~ John Ciardi

Some men are one thing on the surface and another underneath. The true poet shows not just the exterior of his subject, but all the contradictions within, and lets the reader draw his own conclusions. ~ Steven Saylor

The poets needed to learn to pay greater attention to character and to narrative. ~ Edward Hirsch

But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire ... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire. ~ Henry David Thoreau

And thus, in full, there are four classes: the men who feel nothing, and therefore see truly; the men who feel strongly, think weakly, and see untruly (second order of poets); the men who feel strongly, think strongly, and see truly (first order of poets); and the men who, strong as human creatures can be, are yet submitted to influences stronger than they, and see in a sort untruly, because what they see is inconceivably above them. This last is the usual condition of prophetic inspiration. ~ John Ruskin

When I write, regardless of what I'm writing, or how I approach the writing task, I've got this image or shape or feeling inside me somewhere, a sort of embroidery pattern, a sort of magic-pencil outline, a sort of distant melody." - Pamela Mordecai ~ Pamela Mordecai

Poetry is a kind of lying, necessarily. To profit the poet or beauty. But also in that truth may be told only so. Those who, admirably, refuse to falsify (as those who will not risk pretensions) are excluded from saying even so much. Degas said he didn't paint what he saw, but what would enable them to see the thing he had. ~ Jack Gilbert

All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

To a Young Poet Time cannot break the bird's wing from the bird. Bird and wing together Go down, one feather. No thing that ever flew, Not the lark, not you, Can die as others do. ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay

If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet ... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination. ~ Harold Brodkey

Once, I compared poetry to mothers in my book called To Write as a Woman, because my mother is someone who captures me in her body and gave birth to me out of her desire but washed her hands of me after giving birth to me as a poet. ~ Kim Hyesoon

Ausonius must be read to be believed! As poet, no subject is too trivial for him; as courtier, no flattery too excessive. ~ Decimius Magnus Ausonius

He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet. ~ Anne Carson

Ego cannot bring anything extraordinary into the world; the extraordinary comes only through egolessness. And so is the case with the musician and the poet and the dancer. So is the case with everybody. ~ Rajneesh

Poets themselves, tho' liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions ... ~ David Hume

If you cannot be a poet, be a poem. ~ David Carradine