Prose Poem Quotes

Now is History as fast as the mind remembers. ~ Kirby Wright

I never liked the term "experimental writing," but what else is a prose poem? Having written a number of them, I still don't know how they're written. ~ Russell Edson

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it. ~ James Schuyler

The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others - who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, is something people with courage can do without.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals with one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There's the glass you broke in anger, there's the hurt on X's face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves. ~ Joan Didion

There's something about the writing of a prose poem that seems to promise open land and distance in which you can lose yourself. (Sustained rapture?) Sometimes it's just good to have the illusion of being in a place without fences. Then you head out into it, it starts to change. The distance turns out to have all kinds of invisible obstacles requiring a leap or swerve, negotiation, a radical change in direction–it makes its demands on you, and maybe it turns out, after all, to be a poem, or something you hope might offer one more explanation for the mystery. ~ Nancy Eimers

In almost every book I've written, there is a reference to a movie - legendary films, actors and actresses, and forgotten made-for-TV movies. The leaps poems make are not unlike the cuts in a film. The miniature and avant-garde prose poets have perhaps the most obvious ties to film, as a prose poem in its shape is not unlike a movie screen. ~ Denise Duhamel

It pleases him how Spell is how the word is made but also, in the hands of the magician, how the world is changed. One letter separates Word from World, and that letter is like the number one, or an 'I', or a shaft of light between almost closed curtains. There is an old letter called a thorn, which jags and tears at the throat as it's uttered. Later he learns that Grammar and Glamour share the same deeper root, which is further magic, and there can be neither magic without that root, nor plant. He's lost in it like Chid in Child, or God reversed into Dog. Somewhere inside him is a colon. A sentence can last for life. ~ Charles Lambert

Have trembled beneath the pressure of a light beam. ~ Jay Woodman

You big ugly. You too empty. You desert with your nothing nothing nothing. You scorched suntanned. Old too quickly. Acres of suburbs watching the telly. You bore me. Freckle silly children. You nothing much. With your big sea. Beach beach beach. I've seen enough already. You dumb dirty city with bar stools. You're ugly. You silly shopping town. You copy. You too far everywhere. You laugh at me. When I came this woman gave me a box of biscuits. You try to be friendly but you're not very friendly. You never ask me to your house. You insult me. You don't know how to be with me. Road road tree tree. I came from crowded and many. I came from rich. You have nothing to offer. You're poor and spread thin. You big. So what. I'm small. It's what's in. You silent on Sunday. Nobody on your streets. You dead at night. You go to sleep too early. You don't excite me. You scare me with your hopeless. Asleep when you walk. Too hot to think. You big awful. You don't match me. You burnt out. You too big sky. You make me a dot in the nowhere. You laugh with your big healthy. You want everyone to be the same. You're dumb. You do like anybody else. You engaged Doreen. You big cow. You average average. Cold day at school playing around at lunchtime. Running around for nothing. You never accept me. For your own. You always ask me where I'm from. You always ask me. You tell me I look strange. Different. You don't adopt me. You laugh at the way I speak. You think you're better than me. You don't like ~ Ania Walwicz

The prose poem for me becomes a kind of chamber with no way out… a kind of hunt, because what is hunt but a breathing thing caught inside the house or the body or the box without the possibility of an exit? ~ Sabrina Orah Mark

From the prose poem "The Universe Thrums on regardless" in my book SPAN.
We are almost nothing in the night. Reduced to warm blobs and the sound of breathing. There is comfort in that. ~ Jay Woodman

Traditionally poetry is written in lines. But the prose poem is the kind of poem that isn't written in lines. It is lyrical prose that uses the tricks of poetry, such as dense imagery. This is a big topic of debate in poetry land. There's no perfect definition. ~ Campbell McGrath

Lehman uses many conveyances - including the prose poem, the sestina, and curt rhymes - to travel across the writing life of a poet whose instinctive romanticism is always bracing and tough-minded, brimming with a rare generosity. ~ Ken Tucker

I'm being explicit about really horrifying experiences in my life, but my hope has always been to be responsible as an artist and to avoid indulging in my misery, or to come off as an exhibitionist. I don't want to make the listener complicit in my vulnerable prose poem of depression, I just want to honor the experience. I'm not the victim here, and I'm not seeking other peoples' sympathy. I don't blame my parents, they did the best they could. ~ Sufjan Stevens

The prose poem Walk The Red Road is great stuff and deserves to be read aloud. It compares quite favorably to The Walls Of Emerald by Li Chiang Yen, a Chinese poet of the late Tang period. ~ Brian Aldiss

I do love the prose poem because it's such a perverse and provocative little box - always asking to be questioned, never giving a straight or definitive answer. ~ Matthea Harvey

Travellers

We study to travel in life.
We study to travel in the light.

There is a large space of love for us.
There is a large space of death in the night.

We are travellers from world to world.
We are travellers from dream to dream.

We need a simple thing.
We need a space of beginning.

All the emotions of our trip
are the emotions of different lives.

We remind the travellers as dreams
which were made of an incredible light. ~ Ekaterina Yakovina

When Hughes writes, in the first two lines of his poem, "Let America be America again/ Let it be the dream it used to be," he acknowledges that America is primarily a dream, a hope, an aspiration, that may never be fully attainable, but that spurs us to be better, to be larger. He follows this with the repeated counterpoint, "America never was America to me," and through the rest of this remarkable poem he alternates between the oppressed and the wronged of America, and the great dreams that they have for their country, that can never be extinguished. ~ Harry Belafonte

Artist Allen Crawford brings Whitman's undying text to new life in gorgeous hand-lettering and illustrations, transforming the 60-page poem originally published in 1855 as the centerpiece of Leaves of Grass into a breathtaking 256-page piece of art. ~ Maria Popova

A Moment Like This"---

What if I told you it was all meant to be?
Would you believe me? Would you agree?
It's almost that feeling that we've met before
So tell me that you don't think I'm crazy
when I tell you love has come here and now

A moment like this
Some people wait a lifetime for a moment like this
Some people search forever for that one special kiss
Oh I can't believe it's happeneing to me
Some people wait a lifetime for a moment like this

Everything changes but beauty remains
Something so tender I can't explain

I may be dreaming but until I awake
Can't we make this dream last forever?
And I'll cherish all the love we share

A moment like this
Some people wait a lifetime for a moment like this
Some people search forever for that one special kiss
Oh I can't believe it's happeneing to me
Some people wait a lifetime for a moment like this

Could this be the greatest love of all?
I wanna know that you will catch me when I fall
So let me tell you this...

Some people wait a lifetime for a moment like this..
A moment like this
Some people wait a lifetime for a moment like this
Some people search forever for that one special kiss
Oh I can't believe it's happeneing to me

Some people wait a lifetime for a moment, a moment like this...
Oh I can't believe it's ~ Unknown

My mother - my stepmother, really, she herself have been what they call an elocutionist. And she was the one who first encouraged me to write poetry, because she used to read it to us. And then when I began to write when I was nine years old, my first poem was published in the Amsterdam News. I called it "The Graveyard." ~ Ruby Dee

Must always try to be out there
Getting everything out there
Take what is inside yourself
And place it out there. ~ Initially NO

When I was in college I started writing prose, because a very smart professor asked me what I like to read and I said, "Novels," and she said, "You should be writing them then." Memoir never even occurred to me. I think I was afraid of nonfiction and I was afraid of navel-gazing, and of being seen. ~ Melissa Febos

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

You want to lash out at the parts of your self that seem to hold you back. At moments like that, it's important to be able to sit down and speak gently within yourself, as if saying a prayer or reading a poem. Whichever part of you is unhappy, reassure it: accept your many selves, and allow them to speak both to you and to each other. ~ William Sieghart

With fiction, you can talk about plot, character and narrative, whereas a poem brings home the fact that everything that happens in a work of literature happens in terms of language. And this is daunting stuff to deal with. ~ Terry Eagleton

A herd of gods tripped over themselves running after her. ~ Poem Schway

With lines that show an unyielding dedication to craft, these poems are not afraid of meaning or the meaningful. More and more every day, the thinking American asks how she is to believe in love when there is war all about her, and in each of her deeply felt lyrics, Elyse Fenton confronts this question with the kind of tenderness one lover reserves for another. If every poem is indeed a love poem,Clamor is indeed a debut worth reading and about which we must make noise. ~ Jericho Brown

And what was really mine? A handful of rupees

and a mind packed tight with rage. ~ Zilka Joseph

My love, I have tried with all my being
to grasp a form comparable to thine own,
but nothing seems worthy;
I know now why Shakespeare could not
compare his love to a summer's day.
It would be a crime to denounce the beauty
of such a creature as thee,
to simply cast away the precision
God had placed in forging you.
Each facet of your being
whether it physical or spiritual
is an ensnarement
from which there is no release.
But I do not wish release.
I wish to stay entrapped forever.
With you for all eternity.
Our hearts, always as one. ~ Anthony Kolos

But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple - or a green field - a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing - an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness - wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak - to be company. ~ Mary Oliver

I think it was Asimov who once compared prose to windows. Some authors, he said - like Asimov himself - wrote in a style devoid of flourishes or lyricism, telling the story in a just the facts, ma'am kinda way. This is your standard clear-window prose; you don't appreciate it, you don't even notice it, but at least you've got a clear view of what's going down on the other side. Others (Samuel Delany and China Miéville come to mind) write "stained-glass-window" prose: the words contain a kind of beauty in the way they're put together, they draw attention to their own construction and invite whistles of admiration. The only problem with stained-glass windows is, the more ornate the pane, the tougher it is to see what's on the other side. ~ Peter Watts

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

When we hear the sound of the pine trees on a windy day, perhaps the wind is just blowing, and the pine tree is just standing in the wind. That is all they are doing. But the people who listen to the wind in the tree will write a poem, or will feel something unusual. That is, I think, the way everything is. ~ Shunryu Suzuki

You may continue to call it a breakup. I will continue to call it an exorcism. ~ Pleasefindthis

Ever since I was first read to, then started reading to myself, there has never been a line read that I didn't hear. As my eyes followed the sentence, a voice was saying it silently to me. It isn't my mother's voice, or the voice of any person I can identify, certainly not my own. It is human, but inward, and it is inwardly that I listen to it. It is to me the voice of the story or the poem itself. ~ Eudora Welty

Raz was one of those vanguard human beings of indeterminate ethnicity, the magnificent mutts that I hope we are all destined to become given another millennium of intermixing. His skin was a rich pecan color from his dad, who was part African American and part native Hawaiian. His hair, straight and glossy black, and the almond shape of his eyes came from his Japanese grandmother. But their color was the cool blue he'd inherited from his mum, a Swedish windsurfing champion. ~ Geraldine Brooks

You couldn't make up something that looked so right. ~ Chris Howard

The tickling of the sounds of the hearts is more poetic than any poem. ~ Shikha Kaul

It's really hard to fit a complex idea into a 3-minute pop song. And when you're dealing with issues that you're passionate about, usually they have various levels. And within a poem, you can get around the issue of space, and in a song the same way, by simply leaving holes and alluding to what you're talking about. ~ Jon Foreman

A poem isn't selfish. It speaks to people. ~ Wallace Stegner

I was writing up a New Mexico snow-storm, I had it coming down thick and heavy, muffling the roads and mounding on adobe walls and windowsills and whitening the piñon and junipers when the tapping came on the door. ~ Wallace Stegner

Once was Apollo
Now a rat in the Lab'rinth
Send help. And cronuts ~ Rick Riordan

The scrawled letters form words, the words form lines, the lines form a poem. Your eyes scanning across the page give the poem life. ~ Jeff VanderMeer

i let you love me.
i let you take care of me.
i let you do things to me
no one was allowed to do before. ~ AVA.

Poem for My Love
How do we come to be here next to each other
in the night
Where are the stars that show us to our love
inevitable
Outside the leaves flame usual in darkness
and the rain
falls cool and blessed on the holy flesh
the black men waiting on the corner for
a womanly mirage
I am amazed by peace
It is this possibility of you
asleep
and breathing in the quiet air ~ June Jordan

The language of prose is very different than the language of cinema, so the movie has to successfully translate what was in the book. ~ Yann Martel

Heather A. Slomski's stories are downright addictive. I kept promising myself to turn off the light after just one more, and then breaking that promise, beguiled by her cool, measured prose and by the surprises, tensions, and uncanny encounters simmering beneath its elegant surface. ~ Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

I've tried
to become someone else for a while,
only to discover that he, too, was me. ~ Stephen Dunn

Write poetry as if you were in love. If you are always in love you will not always write the same poem, but if you are never in love, you may.
- from My Olivetti Speaks ~ Kenneth Koch

the tall white windmills that came to her mind. How their skinny long arms all turned, but never together, except for just once in a while two of them would be turning the same way, their arms poised at the same place in the sky. ~ Elizabeth Strout

The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion ... elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant. ~ Denise Levertov

I write a book at least three times-once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. ~ Bernard Malamud

woman--
another word for beginning.
another word for revolution.
another word for healing.
another word for being.
another word for me. ~ AVA.