Slam Poetry Quotes

the world is being built up by greedy people wanting higher towers and then there's a war or a hurricane or a tsunami or a virus or a financial collapse
happening
to put things in balance.
this has happened all through history and the humankind survives and moves on.
this is not an exception: this is a rule.
and you are not granted to stay here, that is not your right. you were handed a gift of walking here for a little while, breathing the air, feeling things, but did you say thank you? ever? or just took for granted, carried life like a burden and now you're being angry because suddenly things outside of your control are threatening your peace?
why do you let your peace depend on things outside of your control in the first place? ~ Charlotte Eriksson

Most true musicians don't do it for the money, they do it because they love it. When I did slam poetry, it was a great way for me to express myself, I loved it. ~ Jake Holmes

I want to feel like honey and trombones. I want to feel like honey and trombones ~ Anis Mojgani

And a lot of times in slam poetry I feel like people are so worried about the performance that the words might not be as strong. ~ Amber Tamblyn

Kyria Abrahams, former teen bride of a doomsday cult and seeker of salvation in slam poetry, tells the terribly funny story of her improbable life with candor, wit, and an unsparing eye for the perfect detail. Brilliant. ~ Janice Erlbaum

Charles Simic, when asked what he thought of Slam Poetry events: "They are fun, but they have as much to do with poetry as Elvis Presley had to do with Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk". ~ Charles Simic

For me the poem and the poetry open mic isn't about competition and it never will be. Honestly? It's wrong. The open mic is about 1 poet, one fellow human being up on a stage or behind a podium sharing their work regardless of what form or style they bring to it. In other words? The guy with the low slam score is more than likely a far better poet-writer than the guy who actually won. But who are you? I ? Or really anyone else to judge them? The Poetry Slam has become an overgrown, over used monopoly on American literature and poetry and is now over utilized by the academic & public school establishments. And over the years has sadly become the "McDonalds Of Poetry". We can only hope that the same old stale atmosphere of it all eventually becomes or evolves into something new that translates to and from the written page and that gives new poets with different styles & authentic voices a chance to share their work too. ~ R.M. Engelhardt

Welcome to America, a Wall Street Corporation
Where the stockholders are rich and own this nation
Where cubicle preparation masquerades as education
And people of color are guilty by association. ~ Justin Wetch

Write poorly. Suck. Write awful. Terribly. Frightfully. Don't care. Turn off the inner editor. Let yourself write. Let it flow.
Let yourself fail.
Do something crazy.
Write fifty thousand words in the month of
November.
I did it.
It was fun, it was insane, it was one thousand six
hundred and sixty-seven words a day.
It was possible.
But you have to turn off your inner critic.
Off completely.
Just write. Quickly. In bursts. With joy. If you can't write, run away for a few.Come back. Write again.
Writing is like anything else.
You won't get good at it immediately.
It's a craft, you have to keep getting better.
You don't get to Juilliard unless you practice.
If you want to get to Carnegie Hall, practice, practice, practice.
...Or give them a lot of money.
Like anything else, it takes ten thousand hours to master.
Just like Malcolm Gladwell says.
So write. Fail. Get your thoughts down. Let it rest. Let it marinate. Then edit.
But don't edit as you type,
that just slows the brain down.
Find a daily practice,
for me it's blogging every day.
And it's fun.
The more you write, the easier it gets. The more it is a flow, the less a worry. It's not for school, it's not for a grade, it's just to get your thoughts out there.
You know they want to come out. So keep at it. Make it a practice. And write poorly, write awfully, write with abandon and it m ~ Colleen Hoover

They soar, they are somewhere mid-flight,
The words of love and liberation
And I'm succumbing to stage-fright,
My lips – ice cold in trepidation.
But soon, where birches, thin and humble,
Caress the windows with their leaves, -
The voice of the unseen will rumble
And roses will be tied in wreaths. ~ Anna Akhmatova

Flowers are the poetry of the earth we are supposed to love and understand. ~ Debasish Mridha

Written poetry is different. Best thing is to see it in performance first, then read it. Performance is more provocative. ~ Adrian Mitchell

So, the darkness hid the little girl in herself,
to protect her from the wolves with the human mask on their faces. ~ Sweara Ahmed

The poetry of heroism appeals irresistibly to those who don't go to a war, and even more to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy. It's always so. ~ Louis Ferdinand Celine

Poetry distracts me from going deeper over ... the edge. it is rough and shiny like black diamonds.it dazzles,it enhances,your everything. Each moment,every memory, you touch. ~ Emily H. Sturgill

I wish
I was a spicy margarita
so I could be
adored
by you
forever, often
and abundantly. ~ Atticus Poetry

I have published in 'The New Yorker,' 'Holiday,' 'Life,' 'Mademoiselle,' 'American Heritage,' 'Horizon,' 'The Ladies Home Journal,' 'The Kenyon Review,' 'The Sewanee Review,' 'Poetry,' 'Botteghe Oscure,' the 'Atlantic Monthly,' 'Harper's.' ~ Paul Engle

I'm wrapped in you.
Melting in your silhouette
and becoming one,
a strange contour of love,
flowing with the wind. ~ Tatjana Ostojic

In your sky, you are the brightest star.
Without you light, it's dark like tar.
So love yourself to enlighten others. ~ Debasish Mridha

But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless - a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say. Sax himself much preferred exactitude and explanatory power, and why not? If it was 200 Kelvin outside why not say so, rather than talk about witches' tits and the like, hauling the whole great baggage of the ignorant past along to obscure every encounter with sensory reality? It was absurd. ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

Why are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me? ~ Walt Whitman

You must know the width of the knife and how it ruined you, name the organs it kissed. ~ Olivia Gatwood

How our story has been divided up among the truth-telling professions! Religion, philosophy, history, poetry, compete with each other for our ears; and science competes with all together. And for each we have a different set of ears. But, though we hear much, what we are told is as nothing: none of it gives us ourselves, rather each story-kind steals us to make its reality of us. ~ Laura Riding

Sometimes, I wake up feeling
crazier than usual.

Those are my favorite
and most productive days. ~ B. Diehl

And so it is in poetry also: all this love of curious French metres like the Ballade, the Villanelle, the Rondel; all this increased value laid on elaborate alliterations, and on curious words and refrains, such as you will find in Dante Rossetti and Swinburne, is merely the attempt to perfect flute and viol and trumpet through which the spirit of the age and the lips of the poet may blow the music of their many messages. And so it has been with this romantic movement of ours: it is a reaction against the empty conventional workmanship, the lax execution of previous poetry and painting, showing itself in the work of such men as Rossetti and Burne-Jones by a far greater splendour of colour, a far more intricate wonder of design than English imaginative art has shown before. In Rossetti's poetry and the poetry of Morris, Swinburne and Tennyson a perfect precision and choice of language, a style flawless and fearless, a seeking for all sweet and precious melodies and a sustaining consciousness of the musical value of each word are opposed to that value which is merely intellectual. In this respect they are one with the romantic movement of France of which not the least characteristic note was struck by Theophile Gautier's advice to the young poet to read his dictionary every day, as being the only book worth a poet's reading. ~ Oscar Wilde

True poetry is composed of metaphors and symbols which are born in the heart, rise like clouds, and assume a celestial form; verses formed otherwise are not poetry, but only artificial words, each of which contradicts the feelings inside. The utterances and words that have not been formed in a person's soul as the voice of conscience are all hollow, no matter how embellished they are or how dazzling they seem to be. ~ M. Fethullah Gulen

Would you like some warm Spring pie?
Then, take a cup of clear blue sky.
Stir in buzzes from a bee,
Add the laughter of a tree.

A dash of sunlight should suffice
To give the dew a hint of spice.
Mix with berries, plump and sweet.
Top with fluffy clouds, and eat! ~ Paul F. Kortepeter

Poetry is the essence and evidence of life. ~ Debasish Mridha

Matt Mason must be declared the poet laureate of the Midwest! No other native son celebrates the overlooked America, its unsung citizens (from the anonymous poets to the part-time English teachers), and its expansive indigenous landscape, as well as he does. Mason's poetry is humorous when he wants to be quirky, heartbreaking when he wants to be eloquent, and though he moves effortlessly into other moods and geographies, he always returns to his first and most enduring love (and to what he knows best)-his homeland. ~ Rigoberto Gonzalez

But the poetry of that kiss, the wonder of it, the magic that there was in life for hours after it--who can describe that? It is so easy for an Englishman to sneer at these chance collisions of human beings. To the insular cynic and the insular moralist they offer an equal opportunity. It is so easy to talk of "passing emotion," and how to forget how vivid the emotion was ere it passed. Our impulse to sneer, to forget, is at root a good one. We recognize that emotion is not enough, and that men and women are personalities capable of sustained relations, not mere opportunities for an electrical discharge. Yet we rate the impulse too highly. We do not admit that by collisions of this trivial sort the doors of heaven may be shaken open. ~ E. M. Forster

at man's height the mouth utters its cries, tosses forth its oracles, gives vent to its puns. To allow words to come to life, bare themselves, and show us by chance, for the space of a lightning bolt bony with dice, a few of our reasons for living and dying ~ Michel Leiris

Nothing on this planet can compare with a woman's love - it is kind and compassionate, patient and nurturing, generous and sweet and unconditional. Pure. If you are her man, she will walk on water and through a mountain for you, too, no matter how you've acted out, no matter what crazy thing you've done, no matter the time or demand. If you are her man, she will talk to you until there just aren't any more words left to say, encourage you when you're at rock bottom and think there just isn't any way out, hold you in her arms when you're sick, and laugh with you when you're up. And if you're her man and that woman loves you - I mean really loves you? - she will shine you up when you're dusty, encourage you when you're down, defend you even when she's not so sure you were right, and hang on your every word, even when you're not saying anything worth listening to. And no matter what you do, no matter how many times her friends say you're no good, no matter how many times you slam the door on the relationship, she will give you her very best and then some, and keep right on trying to win over your heart, even when you act like everything she's done to convince you she's The One just isn't good enough.
That's a woman's love - it stands the test of time, logic, and all circumstance. ~ Steve Harvey

I felt for the tormented whirlwinds
Damned for their carnal sins
Committed when they let their passions rule their reason. ~ Dante Alighieri

She moves as water moves, and comes to me,
Stayed by what was, and pulled by what would be. ~ Theodore Roethke

Naturally, etiquette books order handwashing before as well as after meals, but the practice also appears, with a frequency that borders on obsession, in poetry. Poets found it hard to describe a banquet or even a meal without affirming that everyone washed their hands. ~ Katherine Ashenburg

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell. ~ Lascelles Abercrombie

Every known thing used to be unknown
And every rock could become a stone
Someday nature will have to atone
When soul sees dead flesh leaving the bone ~ Munia Khan

You disappoint me -I am the worst liar in the world - I can't hide my pain or my need so I make a bouquet of my sorrows and give them to you ... ~ John Geddes

Because the road is rough and long,
Shall we despise the skylark's song,
That cheers the wanderer's way?
Or trample down, with reckless feet,
The smiling flowerets, bright and sweet,
Because they soon decay? ~ Anne Bronte

Autumn comes
like a buyer of cloth,
her long fingers
touching,
turning orange,
yellow, brown.

taking what she wants,
stretching
the bone taut air.

Her skin crackles beneath
our feet.

I didn't think anyone wanted me,

bruises pulled
like a sweater around
my neck.

We talk
in the pore tightening air,
branches bare,
about the girl buried in the chill
of prewinter.

We show each other
our mutilated children
in the guise of women
as autumn plucks
at our lips.

Each color,
blue, black, ochre
popping like kisses
on the rib lined flesh,
the puberty soft things.

And we muse
how women
keep bruises
hidden
beneath dead
leaves. ~ Janice Mirikitani

There is no faith and no hope
without sleep. ~ H.D.

And I realise the only way to tell the others
is through the way my voice can take these broken words
and turn it into music.
Turn it into poetry.
And I sing to make myself come alive,
but also for you,
because I'd like this to mean something.
To not disappear with the dark I will enter one day
and so now I will tell.
If not for you, then for my own heart,
because it tells me to,
and I'm learning to listen. ~ Charlotte Eriksson

I didn't come in and say: "I'm a singer." I came into the band as a second guitar player and a vocalist, but not the songwriter. I had been writing poetry for years, so I sort of had the nature of the words. I felt like no one else could sing my lyrics, so I took a crack at it. ~ Paul Banks

I have learned that feeling empty sometimes is okay. I've got to refill myself with something at some point. Art, love, solitude, random acts of kindness. I really don't know, but that's what makes being whole again so exciting. ~ Juansen Dizon

I used to joke that if acting didn't work out, poetry was my commonsense fallback. ~ Merritt Wever