On Poetry Quotes

Giving these students, teenagers, any form of power over the use of their own words, allowing them to turn everyday raw material into some form of beauty, is a gift beyond measure. ~ Gloria Ng

I'm floating. I'm flowing. I'm loving, but I'm going. ~ Dominic Riccitello

for all I can really do is
stand here
in September's rain
savoring…
soaking it all in
slipping..
and simply
holding on to poetry
for dear life. ~ Sanober Khan

When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on. ~ Carl Sandburg

I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length. ~ John Ashbery

On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means.
But nobody is asking, How does it feel? ~ Mary Oliver

The stars shine a little brighter when I tell them about you. ~ Sirapa Malla

Your heart has always been willing to bleed, to ache, to humble itself for love. And, when you've had enough, your heart will be the last to let go. ~ Liz Newman

My anthology continues to sell & the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum
however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber's Anthology
he calls poets 'bards,' a girl a 'maid,' & talks about 'Titanic wars'). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him ... (from a letter of December 26, 1936, in Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, p. 124). ~ W.B.Yeats

(My dove my little one
tonight there will be wine and drunken suitors
from the logging camps to pin you down
in the outlying lands of sleep
where all roads lead back to the home-village
and water may be walked on) ~ Al Purdy

Sometimes you must let people go because their pieces no longer fit. This departure is for the betterment of your energy, your space and your precious life. ~ Melody Lee

I'm about 75 pages into a book on poetry. I don't know if anybody wants to read it. It's on any broad variety of subjects. I walk down the street and think of a topic and jot it down and say, 'Okay, that's another one.' They go from the humorous to the serious to every topic imaginable. ~ Marv Levy

a single poem
the thing that can keep me
light on my feet,
when my soul is
heavy with sorrow. ~ Sanober Khan

A single poem, alone
can turn tides
scatter galaxies
and burst forth with rivers
from paradise. ~ Sanober Khan

out of darkness i come, a woman.
and on i go and on. ~ Gertrud Kolmar

And I realised why I have become a poet. It's because I can feel the pain and love of people. I can feel the innermost feelings of people. The tenderness of hurt souls. And I want to heal the world by my words. ~ Avijeet Das

Do all things come to an end?
No, they go on forever. ~ Ruth Stone

I don't have a set schedule to work on poetry at any given time, at the same time every day, but I do try to work on poetry every day and I do find some time every day that I can with some exceptions to work on poetry. ~ Edward Hirsch

In The End The Words Are The All And The Nothing. ~ R.M. Engelhardt

You must be drunk always. That is everything: the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time that crushes your shoulders and bends you earthward, you must be drunk without respite. But drunk on what? On wine, on poetry, on virtue - take your pick. But be drunk. ~ Charles Baudelaire

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 wants me to ruin her
And my pen makes her into poetry! ~ Avijeet Das

The banner of the project is 'Casa de Colores.' Under that banner, I'm going to invite people to do a lot of good things. Perhaps working in groups, working on poetry. ~ Juan Felipe Herrera

THE THINGS POETS & WRITERS DO THAT I LOVE
Listen to the Ancestors
Acknowledge their influences
Trust their gut-feelings and act on them
Maintain openness.
Play
Dance with languages
Be bold
Refuse servility
Avoid arrogance
Embrace the unknown
Love the journey
Respect one's fellow journeyers ~ Billy Marshall Stoneking

The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building. ~ Mary Oliver

Everywhere the poems open. ~ Mary Kinzie

Don't be afraid to get high. Take the chance whenever it presents itself and get high on passion, on poetry, music, and art. Get drunk on nature, on silence, on the sunrise and sunset, on sensuality and sex. Get lit on the moon and lost in the stars. Sip with equal ardor the divine and the mundane alike. Let your inhibitions go. Drop the defenses. Live in the moment, with no motes to cross and no walls to scale before you can allow yourself to become lost - lost in your senses, in your heart, in the world, in your mind. If you want to make the most of this life, you have to feel it fully, to inhale it deeply, to drink with abandon. You can't be afraid to get high. ~ Cristen Rodgers

Thing were falling apart. We just could not slow down. We were evolving into something greater, perhaps too much for our own good. And one thing always remained as I moved on. I saved a little bit of love just in case you would ever return home. ~ Robert M. Drake

When I pour out my hurt and sadness into the typewriter do I then begin to realize that I have created poetry! ~ Avijeet Das

The pen, a double-edged mystery: cuts the writer, heals the reader. ~ Jenim Dibie

It's been a thousand years since I became a poem I have been in your hear all along this journey. ~ Avijeet Das

Nobody is publicly accepted as an expert on poetry unless he displays the sign of poet, mathematician, etc., but universal men want no sign and make hardly any distinction between the crafts of poet and embroiderer.
Universal men are not called poets or mathematicians, etc. But they are all these things and judges of them too. No one could guess what they are, and they will talk about whatever was being talked about when they came in. One quality is not more noticeable in them than another, unless it becomes necessary to put it into practice, and then we remember it. ~ Blaise Pascal

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know. ~ Adrienne Rich

I am surprised to see
that the ocean is still going on. ~ Anne Sexton

You speak
As one who fed on poetry. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

I've done a number of readings at poetry lounges in Vancouver and Los Angeles. I've compiled a book of poetry that's completed, and two others I'm working on. ~ Corin Nemec

I started wanting desperately to say something, to make a point, to be heard - and I still feel that way. Free verse served me best when I embarked on poetry. ~ Denise Duhamel

I've always been a fan of comedy, and I understood from a young age that what makes most comedy work is the immediacy of first person experience. I'd spent a lot of time from 1995-1998 focusing almost exclusively on poetry, and it's an incredibly difficult form in which to achieve a sustained comic tone unless you're Alexander Pope. ~ Kevin Keck

In this world that believes in only self-love, I am a misfit! ~ Avijeet Das

A poet must be a professor of the five senses and must open doors among them. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

I miss you because memory
is a kind editor.
The past is a long scroll and
in it is the story of us,
told with gentle metaphor, and
words that bring
you back and back, even as you
lie there, lying. ~ Corey Mesler

I became part of his ocean, an ocean of poetry that swayed and moved anybody near, that plunged up against every chair and table and tugged and tried our souls. His poem left me dry-mouthed and hungry, diminished only slightly from the bitterness of the beer I continually forgot was in my hand. ~ Annie Fisher

I'm still trying
to find the parts of me
I left hidden
between pages
of a story I never
wanted to forget,
but you were always
in the last place
I looked. ~ Wilder Poetry

It only takes one line, from one poem to change your world...What has poetry done for you lately? ~ David S. Cross

A permanent path
That, once illuminated,
Goes ever onward – a way home… ~ Scott Hastie

The fact that something is in a rhymed form or in blank verse will not make it good poetry. ~ Robert Morgan

My beloved has arrived, but rather than greeting him,
All I can do is bite the corner of my apron with a blank expression-
What an awkward woman am I.
My heart has longed for him as hugely and openly as a full moon
But instead I narrow my eyes, and my glance to him
Is sharp and narrow as the crescent moon.
But then, I'm not the only one who behaves this way.
My mother and my mother's mother were as silly and stumbling as I am when they were girls ...
Still, the love from my heart is overflowing,
As bright and crimson as the heated metal in a blacksmith's forge. ~ Kim Dong Hwa

The light too brief to finish any work
the woman seeks to amplify the dark ~ Leatha Kendrick

Every poet will forever try to write the greatest poem ever written, I have found that this kind of poem can be written with "One" word. And that word consists of a beauty beyond any measure to man and one of the most beauty creations to grace the presents of man. That one word poem is ... ... .. "YOU ~ Michael Jones

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

I really love poetry. I'm a big E.E. Cummings fan and a big Walt Whitman fan, and I have a big book of poetry. ~ Mae Whitman

By eloquence I understand those appeals to our moral perceptions that produce emotion as soon as they are uttered. This is the very enthusiasm that is the parent of poetry. Let the same man go to his closet and clothe in numbers conceptions full of the same fire and spirit, and they will be poetry. ~ Kobe Bryant

How does one say something new and not retell? ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Poetry is life and life is poetry. ~ Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

A great poet must have the ear of a wild Arab listening in the silent desert, the eye of a North American Indian tracing the footsteps of an enemy upon the leaves that strew the forest, the touch of a blind man feeling the face of a darling child. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Once a hunter met a lion near the hungry critter's lair,
and the way that lion mauled him was decidedly unfair;
but the hunter never whimpered when the surgeons, with their thread,
sewed up forty-seven gashes in his mutilated head;
and he showed the scars in triumph, and they gave him pleasant fame,
and he always blessed the lion that had camped upon his frame.
Once that hunter, absent minded, sat upon a hill of ants,
and about a million bit him, and you should have seen him dance!
And he used up lots of language of a deep magenta tint,
and apostrophized the insects in a style unfit to print.
And it's thus with worldly troubles;
when the big ones come along, we serenely go to meet them, feeling valiant, bold and strong, but the weary little worries with their poisoned stings and smarts, put the lid upon our courage, make us gray, and break our hearts. ~ Walt Mason

I want to be eaten alive. I want

to feel wanted. ~ Elisabeth Hewer

There is no merit in being truthful when one is truthful by nature, or rather when one can be nothing else; it is a gift, like poetry or music. But it needs courage to be truthful after carefully considering the matter, unless a kind of pride is involved; for example, the man who says to himself, "I am ugly," and then says, "I am ugly" to his friends, lest they should think themselves the first to make the discovery. ~ Eugene Delacroix

If i write a book it will probably be a book about how not to use the internet or a book of poetry. ~ Misha Collins

I am not interested in poetry for poetry's sake. ~ Ernesto Cardenal

Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings. ~ Victor Hugo

The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation. ~ Michelle Obama

POETRY: A sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog. ~ Carl Sandburg

In the sphere of natural investigation, as in poetry and painting, the delineation of that which appeals most strongly to the imagination, derives its collective interest from the vivid truthfulness with which the individual features are portrayed. ~ David Hume

I mostly hope you think I miss you and in the end you hope you'll get me, but that's fantasy, untrue as you, and bitter as the hope you left me. ~ Phar West Nagle

It turns out I was right.
But nothing has come of it. ~ Wislawa Szymborska

The music just tends to be a vehicle for that poetry. ~ Mark Knopfler

I hear nothing but the hustle and bustle of the city. Cars with flashing lights zip past me. People talk, some loud, some quiet. I whisper to myself. "This is what it's like to go unnoticed." I take in a deep breath and inhale the freezing air. It smells like ice here. Ice and cigarettes. ~ Rachel Ellynn M.

My dad used to say that giving someone a poem is like gifting them a feeling. Everything will change from black and white into color. ~ Margo Rabb

REMEMBERING SOUTH OF THE RIVER

South of the river is good,
Long ago, I knew the landscape well.
At sunrise, the river's flowers are red like fire,
In spring, the river's water's green as lilies.
How could I not remember south of the river? ~ Bai Juyi

Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism - to the blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity, it leads us to death, and through death to continuity. Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea. ~ Georges Bataille

Even though I always claimed that I didn't want to write about something - once I wasn't writing fiction, anyway; I think for me the change from fiction to poetry was that in fiction I was writing about something, in poetry I was writing something. ~ Vito Acconci

When all is lost, there is still a memory. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Lorenzo: In such a night stood Dido with a willow in her hand upon the wild sea-banks, and waft her love to come again to Carthage
Jessica: In such a night Medea gathered the enchanted herbs that did renew old Aeson.
Lorenzo: In such a night did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew, and with an unthrift love did run from Venice, as far as Belmont.
Jessica: In such a night did young Lorenzo swear he lov'd her well, stealing her soul with many vows of faith, and ne'er a true one.
Lorenzo: In such a night did pretty Jessica (like a little shrow) slander her love, and he forgave it her.
Jessica: I would out-night you, did nobody come; but hark, I hear the footing of a man. ~ William Shakespeare

We number nothing that we spend for you;
Our duty is so rich, so infinite,
That we may do it still without accompt.
Vouchsafe to show the sunshine of your face,
That we, like savages, may worship it. ~ William Shakespeare

The writing of poetry is a chancy business, it's currency solitude and loss, its tools coffee and too much wine, its hours midnight, dawn, and dusk, and unlike other trade the hours asleep are not time off. ~ Keith Miller

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are. ~ Philip Larkin

Those eyes startled me
I swear they saw straight
to the core of my fractured,
hungry, wild soul. ~ Melody Lee

You carry darkness within you, be brave. ~ Elancharan Gunasekaran

Answer Professor Mandell's letter when you get a chance and the patience. Ask him not to send me any more poetry books. I already have enough for 1 year anyway. I am quite sick of it anyway. A man walks along the beach and unfortunately gets hit in the head by a cocoanut. His head unfortunately cracks open in two halves. Then his wife comes along the beach singing a song and sees the 2 halves and recognizes them and cries heart breakingly. That is exactly where I am tired of poetry. Supposing the lady just picks up the 2 halves and shouts into them very angrily "Stop that!" Do not mention this when you answer his letter, however. It is quite controversial and Mrs. Mandell is a poet besides. ~ J.D. Salinger

I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry. ~ Shelby Foote

For an American, there's no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There's not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there's a snob value to the art. ~ Robert Pinsky