Selling Poetry Quotes

I once tried hawking my own book around the pubs in the hope that, like the Salvation Army, I too could sell to the cerebrally relaxed. It was a disaster. I had beer thrown over me for being a) a nuisance, b) not as good as Wordsworth and c) a nancy for writing poetry in the first place. ~ Peter Finch

The commitment to working at poetry is important because a poet is a maker, and a poem is a made thing. We have to honor our feelings by working to transform them into something meaningful and lasting. ~ Edward Hirsch

I recreate myself; that is my only power. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Dressed to Live

Today is my newest garment.

Let me put it on
with ceremony.
Let me step into the day
as if to bathe in the passing hours.
Let me tuck in the loose ends
with precision.

Today is my newest garment.

Let me wear it as if it holds
my head high,
as if it can carry me
on its shoulders,
as if it will protect me
from the howl.

Today is my newest garment.

Let me fill my pockets.
Let them bulge with riches:
light on the wide sidewalk,
kind words from a stranger,
things perched, newly born,
carefully placed, aging gracefully.

Today is my newest garment.

At night
let me disrobe
grateful and whole,
knowing that
tomorrow
I will dress again. ~ Nancy Boutilier

Say this life and let it be enough, for once. ~ Joe Bolton

Jewel moved 432,000 hardcover copies of A Night Without Armor, thereby making her the best-selling American poet of the past fifty years. ~ Chuck Klosterman

A rose lay open in full bloom
and, looking from my garden room,
I watched the sun-baked flower fill with rain.
It seemed so fragile,
resting there,
and such a silence filled the air,
the beauty of the moment caused me pain.
"What more?" I thought. "There must be more."
As if in answer then, I saw
one weighty drop that caused my rose to fall.
It trembled, then cascaded down
to earth just staining gentle brown
and, since then, I've felt different.
That's all. ~ Julie Andrews Edwards

The four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I would very much like to become a best-selling author. ~ Manuel Puig

The fog between the trees of ghosts who lift suns. ~ Gwen Calvo

You love me
and love me not
your love is an arm of clock
joining hands with mine
only to leave me again ~ Lori Jenessa Nelson

I cut off all my hair, cut away
at the soft curves of my clothing
until I have edges once again,
using my body like broken glass
to slice at the world around me.

I have to take something back,
because I have nothing more to give.

Eloi, eloi, lema sabachthani? ~ Miriam Joy

The moon beckons me.
The wolves call my name.
I am made for the night,
a creature of the dark
where my soul can breathe
and my spirit can play. ~ Melody Lee

A good basic selling idea, involvement and relevancy, of course, are as important as ever, but in the advertising din of today, unless you make yourself noticed and believed, you ain't got nothin'. ~ Leo Burnett

Give me the scorn of the stars and a peak defiant;
Wail of the pines and a wind with the shout of a giant;
Night and a trail unknown and a heart reliant. ~ Robert W. Service

I give eulogy to those who are meant to see. You see those who are meant to be by the seeds they sow, growing near the living water, sprouting into a tree. The fruits they reap are sweet like dripping honey, warm to the touch and sweet to the buds of taste. ~ Jose R. Coronado

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later. ~ Robert Morgan

If God could transcribe my heart, it'd still read "I love you". ~ Jenim Dibie

No one can usurp the heights ...
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest. ~ John Keats

Her lips write silent poetry upon mine. ~ B.L. Berry

When they gaze in confusion
at the broken, odd shaped, colorful
shards of glass that we are,

let them know

that we too belong here, here
in this gallery. Masterpieces,
we are not

here by accident

but have been carefully assembled
and put together and are held together
in this ceramic panel - our bodies of clay -
by good intentions.

We too are works of art. ~ Ayokunle Falomo

That small word "Force," they make a barber's block,
Ready to put on
Meanings most strange and various, fit to shock
Pupils of Newton ...
The phrases of last century in this
Linger to play tricks
Vis viva and Vis Mortua and Vis Acceleratrix:
Those long-nebbed words that to our text books still
Cling by their titles,
And from them creep, as entozoa will,
Into our vitals.
But see! Tait writes in lucid symbols clear
One small equation;
And Force becomes of Energy a mere
Space-variation. ~ James Clerk Maxwell

After I graduated from high school, one of the former workers on our farm asked if I would be willing to join him in selling Fuller brushes through the summer. It seemed like a perfect way to make some money for college. And being away from my parents and learning to make my own way gave me self confidence. ~ Billy Graham

I was an opponent of Saddam Hussein when the British and American governments and businessmen were selling him guns and gas. ~ George Galloway

Ive realized that even more that what is beautiful about the accordion is to play with a single finger sometimes, with a very pure, very pointed sound that gives a lot of poetry and emotion. ~ Richard Galliano

In far-off lands stand the great stones
on which my thoughts rest.
It was a foreigner who wrote the strange words
on the hard board that is called my soul.
Days and nights I lie and think
about things that never happened:
my thirsty soul was once given a drink. ~ Edith Sodergran

Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically. ~ Jean Cocteau

Well, I had this little notion - I started writing when I was eleven, writing poetry. I was passionately addicted to it; it was my great refuge through adolescence. ~ Harry Mathews

Both money and art powdered as they are with the romance and poetry of the age are magic. Rather money is magic art is magik. Money is stagecraft slight of hand a bag of clever tricks. Art is a plexus of forces and influences that act upon the senses by means of practical yet permanently inexplicable secret links. Admittedly the line between the two can be as thin as a dime. ~ Tom Robbins

We live in the current World, but our eyes are set on the future. ~ Ammanulah

For while libertarians have too often been opportunists who lose sight of or under-cut their ultimate goal, some have erred in the opposite direction: fearing and condemning any advances toward the idea as necessarily selling out the goal itself. The tragedy is that these sectarians, in condemning all advances that fall short of the goal, serve to render vain and futile the cherished goal itself. ~ Murray N. Rothbard

Why Roses Crave Thorns"

Petals detach from a wilting bud - a single stem plucked before fully blossomed. They descend in hesitant swirls, too soft and limp to shatter like teardrops. One by one they light to blanket a single shadow below.

She is a rose, young and innocent, with beauty incomparable to shame all others. She has flowered enough to stop the observer in his tracks, awestruck. He is compelled to reach out and touch. The petals delight at a silken caress, her bud everything desirable but defenseless - without a sharp edge to make an admirer pause, to warn the intrusive hand. 'Stay back! Stay back!'

His fingers curl around the stem to tug, and suddenly the rose craves a thorn.

It is madness not to want her and yet madness to cut her down. Let the flower thrive and blush to someday flaunt layers of silken favors! But the world will not have it. A single stem is severed in a selfish moment of desire - a yearning to hold and possess.

Alone and forgotten her petals cry, raining in hesitant swirls where they accumulate to blanket her shadow below. Dry, withered, craving the thorns. Beautiful no more. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it ~ Gustave Flaubert

I thought your boyfriend died?" Nicky asked, and it was actually a good question, and I was so
mad that I wasn't even embarrassed to answer him.
"We were three," I choked out. "I had a night lover and a day lover," I said, and it felt like
poetry, just to say it there in public in the middle of the quad, under the foggy sun. "And they loved
each other like night loves the day. And then the night lover died, and the day lover and I were naked in
the sunshine, with only ourselves for cover. ~ Amy Lane

Where are you hiding my love?
Each day without you will never come again.
Even today you missed a sunset on the ocean,
A silver shadow on yellow rocks I saved for you,
A squirrel that ran across the road,
A duck diving for dinner.
My God! There may be nothing left to show you
Save wounds and weariness
And hopes grown dead,
And wilted flowers I picked for you a lifetime ago,
Or feeble steps that cannot run to hold you,
Arms too tired to offer you to a roaring wind,
A face too wrinkled to feel the ocean's spray. ~ James Kavanaugh

The trouble with poetry is that it encourages the writing of more poetry ... ~ Billy Collins

Poetry is simply literature reduced to the essence of its active principle. It is purged of idols of every kind, of realistic illusions, of any conceivable equivocation between the language of "truth" and the language of "creation. ~ Paul Valery

[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job ... into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen. ~ Milan Kundera

There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write. ~ Henry R. Luce

Love makes you do,
the best of things.
Love makes you do,
the worst of things,
It's a feeling extreme,
that doesn't exist in between. ~ Jasleen Kaur Gumber

It must have been an endless breathing in: between the wish to know and the wish to praise there was no seam. ~ Margaret Atwood

Sometimes the world loses its face. it becomes too base. The task of the poet is to restore its face, because otherwise man is lost in doubt and despair. It is an indication that the world need not always be like this; it can be different.
When I wrote...that I accepted the salvational goal of poetry, that was exactly what I had in mind, and I still believe that poetry can either save or destroy nations. ~ Czeslaw Milosz

i am learning that when love wants to stay it will stay.
i am learning that when love wants to go it will go. ~ AVA.

True poetry is not of earth, 'T is more of Heaven by its birth. ~ William Faulkner

Your friends, and your associates, and the people around you, and the environment that you live in, and the speakers around you - the speakers around you - and the communicators around you, are the poetry makers.
If your mother tells you stories, she is a poetry maker.
If your father says stories, he is a poetry maker.
If your grandma tells you stories, she is a poetry maker.
And that's who forms our poetics. ~ Juan Felipe Herrera

I am bothered by poems I don't understand. ~ Joyce Rachelle

There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking. ~ Jean De La Bruyere

He knows he will be born again,
And start fresh anew. ~ Dejan Stojanovic