Poetry In Disguise Quotes

Thanks to Karen Connelly who read earlier versions of this manuscript and to Ronald Hatch my editor and publisher. ~ Nancy Holmes

Poetry Is a Destructive Force
That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.
It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.
Corazon, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.
He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own ...
The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man. ~ Wallace Stevens

in a split second of letting down my guard and opening up my soul, you corrupted it with this magnificent disease called 'love ~ Yefon Isabelle

People have a very limited idea of what being creative is - playing the guitar or the flute or writing poetry - so people go on writing rubbish in the name of poetry. You have to find out what you can do and what you cannot do. Everybody cannot do everything. You have to search and find your destiny. You have to grope in the dark, I know. It is not very clear-cut what your destiny is, but that's how life is. And it is good that one has to search for it - in the very search, something grows. ~ Rajneesh

You'll be seeing him tomorrow night, anyway."

"I am?" Hyacinth asked, at precisely the moment Mr. St. Clair said, "She will?"

"You're accompanying me to the Pleinsworth poetry reading," Lady D told her grandson. "Or have you forgotten?"

Hyacinth sat back, enjoying the sight of Gareth St. Clair's mouth opening and closing in obvious distress. He looked a bit like a fish, she decided. A fish with the features of a Greek god, but still, a fish.

"I really…" he said. "That is to say, I can't - "

"You can, and you will be there," Lady D said. "You promised."

He regarded her with a stern expression. "I cannot imagine - "

"Well, if you didn't promise, you should have done, and if you love me…"

Hyacinth coughed to cover her laugh, then tried not to smirk when Mr. St. Clair shot a dirty look in her direction.

"When I die," he said, "surely my epitaph will read, 'He loved his grandmother when no one else would.'"

"And what's wrong with that?" Lady Danbury asked. ~ Julia Quinn

To write poetry, like sincere poetry, it is like performing heart surgery on yourself without anesthesia ... in public ... You are peeling back layers. You are dissecting yourself ... You do not know what they [the audience] is going to do when you reach into yourself and rip out your organs to be displayed ~ Amir Sulaiman

The following year the house was substantially remodeled, and the conservatory removed. As the walls of the now crumbling wall were being torn down, one of the workmen chanced upon a small leatherbound book that had apparently been concealed behind a loose brick or in a crevice in the wall. By this time Emily Dickinson was a household name in Amherst. It happened that this carpenter was a lover of poetry- and hers in particular- and when he opened the little book and realized that that he had found her diary, he was "seized with a violent trembling," as he later told his grandson. Both electrified and terrified by the discovery, he hid the book in his lunch bucket until the workday ended and then took it home. He told himself that after he had read and savored every page, he would turn the diary over to someone who would know how to best share it with the public. But as he read, he fell more and more deeply under the poet's spell and began to imagine that he was her confidant. He convinced himself that in his new role he was no longer obliged to give up the diary. Finally, having brushed away the light taps of conscience, he hid the book at the back of an oak chest in his bedroom, from which he would draw it out periodically over the course of the next sixty-four years until he had virtually memorized its contents. Even his family never knew of its existence.

Shortly before his death in 1980 at the age of eighty-nine, the old man finally showed his most prized po ~ Jamie Fuller

THE THREE LAWS OF ALL

You are never to worship a living soul,
Except for three entities:
Three - YOUR FATHER
Two - YOUR MOTHER
And one - HE WHO IS ALL.


To begin to study All Things,
You must start with only three things:
Man,
Nature,
And the universe.
All three are a reflection of each other.
So simply study one,
To understand the other.

All of creation started with JUST three things,
And no living thing was created without them:
Water,
Light,
And dust.

Know these three basic laws.
And you will come to know
He Who Is All.
Forever big, yet sometimes small,
He is found in the heart
Of everything.


Suzy Kassem Poetry, Truth is Crying ~ Suzy Kassem

I am not soft. I do not have that luxury. I am the wolf in girl's clothing; all snarls and claws. My mother once told me: be gentle, be kind. She forgot to mention that the world was full of beasts, and if I wanted to survive I would have to become one myself. ~ Nichole McElhaney

The bourgeois man is first and foremost fashioned and turned into a machine. He is happy even if he has become only a number in a political sum, and he can be called in every respect perfect if he has transformed himself from a person into a cipher. As it is with the individual, so with the masses. They eat, marry, produce children, become old, and so on to infinity. Pure life simply for the sake of life is the source of baseness, and everything is base that has nothing of the world-spirit of philosophy and poetry. ~ Friedrich Schlegel

I want to be bruised by God.
I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.
I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.
I want to be entered and picked clean. ~ Charles Wright

Some say; "Poetry is what gets lost in translation!"
In this sense, my life is a bitter poem. But that is the force of nature.
I already changed it to my alternative order: "Poetry must find ways of breaking distance. ~ Fereidoon Yazdi

Poetry puts starch in your backbone so you can stand, so you can compose your life. ~ Maya Angelou

The fancy things I like are sheets. Pots and pans. And the things I really like aren't fancy at all: old aprons and hankies. Butter wrappers from one pound blocks. Peony bushes, hardback books of poetry. And I like things less than that; the sticky remains at the bottom of the apple crisp dish. The way cats sometimes run sideways. The presence of a rainbow in a puddle of oil. Mayonaise jars. Pussy willows. Wash on a line. The tick-tock of clocks, the blue of the neon sign at the local movie house. The fact that there is a local movie house. ~ Elizabeth Berg

Romance like a ghost escapes touching; it is always where you are not, not where you are. The interview or conversation was prose at the time, but it is poetry in the memory. ~ George William Curtis

All the poetry in the world is in that face. ~ Christopher Isherwood

Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring that's landed on your finger, a massive
insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end

of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt
in your voice under a blanket and said there's two kinds
of women - those you write poems about

and those you don't. It's true. I never brought you
a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed.
My idea of courtship was tapping Jane's Addiction

lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M.,
whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I worked
within the confines of my character, cast

as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan
of your dark side. We don't have a past so much
as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power

never put to good use. What we had together
makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught
one another like colds, and desire was merely

a symptom that could be treated with soup
and lots of sex. Gliding beside you now,
I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy,

as if I invented it, but I'm still not immune
to your waterfall scent, still haven't developed
antibodies for your smile. I don't know how long

regret existed before humans stuck a word on it.
I don't know how many paper towels it would take
to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light

of a candle being blown out tr ~ Jeffrey McDaniel

Anyone can bend a judge's or jury's will with bravado, but to do it on paper--in black and white--that takes a particular kind of artistry. It's truth in poetry. ~ Rebecca Serle

We thought everything would be
forgotten, but I still remember your
claws running down my back.

I wonder if you still think about us,
the way I do.

How our legs would crash
into each other in the middle
of the night, and how we ended
up creating the moon in the
confines of our beds. ~ Zaeema J. Hussain

From the wounded soul, comes poetry and music. In return, music and poetry heals the soul. ~ Danielle Ever Rose

The main element crucial for the survival of life is also a demon in disguise; it will snatch your life away as quickly as you were given it. ~ Scott A. Butler

The real you is still a little child who never grew up. Sometimes that little child comes out when you are having fun or playing, when you feel happy, when you are painting, or writing poetry, or playing the piano, or expressing yourself in some way. These are the happiest moments of your life - when the real you comes out, when you don't care about the past and you don't worry about the future. You are childlike. ~ Miguel Ruiz

Look for me
in sleepless nights,
among the stars,
I'll be your guiding star...

Look for me
in the moments of happiness,
on a green field,
I'll be your joy.
... ~ Zorica Savron

A township where one primitive forest waves above, while another primitive forest rots below, - such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Her poetry is written on the ghost of trees, whispered on the lips of lovers.
As a little girl, she would drift in and out of libraries filled with dead poets and their musky scent. She held them in her hands and breathed them in
wanting so much to be part of their world ...
It was on her sixteenth birthday that she first fell in love. With a boy who brought her red roses and white lies. When he broke her heart, she cried for days.
Then hopeful, she sat with a pen in her hand, poised over the blank white sheet, but it refused to draw blood ...
She learned too late that poets are among the damned, cursed to commiserate over their loss, to reach with outstretched hands
hands that will never know the weight of what they seek. ~ Lang Leav

The Release

In those last moments before
the platter of salt and dirt
lay on his stomach, wax-light
had waved across a mute heart,
his son waited by the bed.
Raised to believe the soul left
the body with its last breath,
he listened for death's rattle,
then pressed his lips like a kiss
to his father's lips, and took
into his mouth the breath that
had given him breath, a life
distilled to one stir of air
soft as moth wings against palms,
held a moment, then let go. ~ Ron Rash

I was never happier than on the nights we stayed home, lying on the living room rug. We talked about classes and poetry and politics and sex. Neither of us were in love with the Iowa Writers' Workshop, but it didn't really matter because we had no place else to go. What we had was the little home we made together, our life in the ugly green duplex. We lived next door to a single mother named Nancy Tate who was generous in all matters. She would drive us to the grocery store and give us menthol cigarettes and come over late at night after her son was asleep to sit in our kitchen and drink wine and talk about Hegel and Marx. Iowa City in the eighties was never going to be Paris in the twenties, but we gave it our best shot. ~ Ann Patchett

Heroic poetry tends in its simplest form to be concerned with immediate events and local heroes. A certain length of tradition is required before the epic poem, telling the story of the hero, becomes current. Heroic poetry assumes that the audience knew what the outcome of the battle was, and is concerned with individual feats; the context is of little importance. Epic poems only become attractive as a form when the audience needs to be told who the heroes were. ~ Richard Barber

My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies. Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you. ~ John Berger

There is poetry in a pork chop to a hungry man. ~ Philip Gibbs

And Now for a Topic of International Concern:
Corn Thinks

/Kôrn/ -
It does not sink.
It does not blink.
It does not look pink–
Nor does it write in pen and ink.

It does not slink.
It does not link.
It does not like finks–
Nor does it lie; hood or play tiddlywinks.

It is distinct.
It is succinct.
It is not a Sphinx -
Corn thinks.

-Poems on the Run, Vol. I ~ Douglas Laurent

I do not believe that there is anything inherently and unavoidably ugly about industrialism. A factory or even a gasworks is not obliged of its own nature to be ugly, any more than a palace or a dog-kennel or a cathedral. . . . But in any case, though the ugliness of industrialism is the most obvious thing about it and the thing every newcomer exclaims against, I doubt whether it is centrally important. And perhaps it is not even desirable, industrialism being what it is, that it should learn to disguise itself as something else. As Mr Aldous Huxley has truly remarked, a dark Satanic mill ought to look like a dark Satanic mill and not like the temple of mysterious and splendid gods. Moreover, even in the worst of the industrial towns one sees a great deal that is not ugly in the narrow aesthetic sense. A belching chimney or a stinking slum is repulsive chiefly because it implies warped lives and ailing children. Look at it from a purely aesthetic standpoint and it may have a certain macabre appeal. I find that anything outrageously strange generally ends by fascinating me even when I abominate it. ~ George Orwell

Gretel in Darkness:


This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch's cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas....

Now, far from women's arms
And memory of women, in our father's hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of that gleaming kiln--

Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel
we are there still, and it is real, real,
that black forest, and the fire in earnest. ~ Louise Gluck

I do have a funny perception of mine I'd like to share. Being basically a lifetime poet. I've had many people say "I don't like poetry" But they'll listen to song after song that rhymes on the end in couplets Just a thought ... ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

But truly, what man doth not wear a mask?
For all of us are maskèd in some way–
Some choose sharp cruelty as their outward face,
Some put themselves behind a king's façade,
Some hind behind the mask of bravery,
Some put on the disguise of arrogance.
But underneath our masks are we not one?
Do we not all wish for love, and joy, and peace? ~ Ian Doescher

The best poems take long journeys. I like poetry best that journeys
while remaining in the human scale
to the other world, which may be a place as easily overlooked as a bee's wing ~ Robert Bly

In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation - it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise 1 in the primer of minor poetry. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented ... ~ Amy Lowell

Society is like a crowd in carnival costumes with everyone fearful that others will see through his disguise. ~ Vernon Howard

Hinged to forgetfulness like a door,
she slowly closed out of sight,
and she was the woman I loved,
but too many times she slept like
a mechanical deer in my caresses,
and I ached in the metal silence
of her dreams. ~ Richard Brautigan

The man who invented Eskimo Pie made a million dollars, so one is told, but E.E. Cummings, whose verse has been appearing off andon for three years now, and whose experiments should not be more appalling to those interested in poetry than the experiment of surrounding ice-cream with a layer of chocolate was to those interested in soda fountains, has hardly made a dent in the doughy minds of our so-called poetry lovers. ~ John Dos Passos