Slow Reading Poetry Quotes

He does not always remain bent over the
pages; he often leans back and closes
his eyes over a line he has been reading
again, and its meaning spreads through
his blood. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

A man awakes every morning
and instead of reading the newspaper
reads Act V of Othello.
He sips his coffee and is content
that this is the news he needs
as his wife looks on helplessly. ~ B.J. Ward

If, however, the observers see the poiesis in the work they cease at once being observers. They find themselves in its time, aware that it remains unfinished, aware that their reading of the poetry is itself poetry. Infected then by the genius of the artist they recover their own genius, becoming beginners with nothing but possibility ahead of them. ~ James P. Carse

My dad is a Jack Nicholson lookalike and a frustrated performer, my mother's into reading and poetry. I suppose the thing I owe them most is my confidence. ~ Michael Sheen

And Ásta Sóllilja, it was she who swept on wings of poetry into those spheres which she had sensed as if in distant murmur one spring night last year when she was reading about the little girl who journeyed over the seven mountains; and the distant murmur had suddenly swelled to a song in her ears, and her soul found here for the first time its origin and its descent; happiness, fate, sorrow, she understood them all; and many other things. When a man looks at a flowering plant growing slender and helpless up in the wilderness among a hundred thousand stones, and he has found this plant only by chance, then he asks: Why is it that life is always trying to burst forth? Should one pull up this plant and use it to clean one's pipe? No, for this plant also broods over the limitation and the unlimitation of all life, and lives in the love of the good beyond these hundred thousand stones, like you and me; water it with care, but do not uproot it, maybe it is little Ásta Sóllilja. ~ Halldor Laxness

While Elstir, at my request, went on painting, I wandered about in the half-light, stopping to examine first one picture, then another.
Most of those that covered the walls were not what I should chiefly have liked to see of his work, paintings in what an English art journal which lay about on the reading-room table in the Grand Hotel called his first and second manners, the mythological manner and the manner in which he shewed signs of Japanese influence, both admirably exemplified, the article said, in the collection of Mme. de Guermantes. Naturally enough, what he had in his studio were almost all seascapes done here, at Balbec. But I was able to discern from these that the charm of each of them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the things represented in it, analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew. ~ Marcel Proust

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. ~ Antonin Artaud

The Poet's Credo
Write poetry like there's nobody reading,
Love poetry like nothing else matters,
Read another man's poetry as if
it was written only for you,
And live poetry like it's heaven on earth.

All the rest, my readers, is a footnote. ~ Beryl Dov

I guess I've done a lot of different kinds of performing at various times - opera singing, poetry reading, not least high school teaching - and I do enjoy it, at least sometimes. But I find it incredibly anxiety-producing and exhausting. Privacy is more congenial, and I go a little crazy if I can't spend a big chunk of every day, or almost every day, alone. Certainly I have to be alone to write. ~ Garth Greenwell

What is the point of all these books
when I learn best by reading your body? ~ Kamand Kojouri

There's plenty of room for strangeness, mystery, originality, wildness, etc. in poems that also invite the reader into the human and alive center about which the poem circles. ~ Thomas Lux

Watch, how the sun
slowly rises
from behind my ear

new lines, new countries
spring up in my palms

my rough hair
become swaying silk

and all the leaves
in my body
become lusher than fruits. ~ Sanober Khan

The first piece of advice I would give any writer is to read a lot and to read widely. Firstly you start to realize what's out there and what isn't out there. Publishers are looking for stories that haven't been told before. Reading other people can also improve your own writing. I love reading poetry even though I wouldn't think of writing it. A great poet can say in two lines what it takes me a whole novel to express. If I've learned from any kind of writing, it's poetry – and the lesson is concision. What can you leave out and the reader will still get the message? ~ Ian Rankin

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

There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured. ~ Alberto Manguel

The universe seeks equilibriums; it prefers to disperse energy, disrupt organization, and maximize chaos. Life is designed to combat these forces. We slow down reactions, concentrate matter, and organize chemicals into compartments; we sort laundry on Wednesdays. "It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe," James Gleick wrote. We live in the loopholes of natural laws, seeking extensions, exceptions and excuses. The laws of nature still mark the outer boundaries of permissibility - but life, in all its idiosyncratic, mad weirdness, flourishes by reading between the lines. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

When do things change entirely you wonder? When do they get better? When will it be possible? It is possible now. You are built to open your fists and show me your palms and to pass food from them into the hands of others. You are built for comfort and for fire, for battle and for poetry and you are a child of my family and my family was made by the world. Here we stand in the dark now and I am old and you are holding my hand and walking me from the bed to the window. We are looking out at all of it, the wonder and the danger. There are voices and the sun blazes and everything is bright enough that if I were reading the letters on your skin, I wouldn't be able to parse them. Now look at your own hand and the wrinkles in them. Those wrinkles are what happens when you clinch your fists. You were born for this resistance, for this preparation, for this life. You were born to fight. ~ Victor LaValle

Of snowy afternoons,
waiting, watching and waiting.

To see her small and larger than life.

She is both fragile and determined,
like a paper umbrella in the rain. ~ Jessica De La Davies

The question 'Why poetry?' isn't asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting question would be: "What is the nature of experience, and especially the experience of using language, that calls poetic utterance into existence? What is there about experience that's unutterable?" You can't generalize very usefully about poetry; you can't reduce its nature down to a kernel that underlies all its various incarnations. I guess my internal conversation suggests that if you can't successfully answer the question of "Why poetry?," can't reduce it in the way I think you can't, then maybe that's the strongest evidence that poetry's doing its job; it's creating an essential need and then satisfying it. ~ Richard Ford

Poets write for an audience. And when the audience is soulful and sensitive to understand the nuances and subtleties of poetry then writing and reading the lines of your poetry becomes a pleasure! ~ Avijeet Das

I recommend the art of slow reading. ~ Amos Oz

He came to read; two or three books
are lying open: history and poetry.
But after just ten minutes of reading
he lets them drop. There on the sofa
he falls asleep. He truly is devoted to reading-
but he is twenty-three years old, and very handsome.
And just this afternoon, Eros surged
within his perfect limbs and on his lips.
Into his beautiful flesh came the heat of passion,
and there was no foolish embarrassment
about the form that pleasure took.. ~ C.P. Cavafy

Epistle to Miss Blount, On Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation"

As some fond virgin, whom her mother's care
Drags from the town to wholesome country air,
Just when she learns to roll a melting eye,
And hear a spark, yet think no danger nigh;
From the dear man unwillingly she must sever,
Yet takes one kiss before she parts for ever:
Thus from the world fair Zephalinda flew,
Saw others happy, and with sighs withdrew;
Not that their pleasures caused her discontent,
She sighed not that They stayed, but that She went.
She went, to plain-work, and to purling brooks,
Old-fashioned halls, dull aunts, and croaking rooks,
She went from Opera, park, assembly, play,
To morning walks, and prayers three hours a day;
To pass her time 'twixt reading and Bohea,
To muse, and spill her solitary tea,
Or o'er cold coffee trifle with the spoon,
Count the slow clock, and dine exact at noon;
Divert her eyes with pictures in the fire,
Hum half a tune, tell stories to the squire;
Up to her godly garret after seven,
There starve and pray, for that's the way to heaven.
Some Squire, perhaps, you take a delight to rack;
Whose game is Whisk, whose treat a toast in sack,
Who visits with a gun, presents you birds,
Then gives a smacking buss, and cries – No words!
Or with his hound comes hollowing from the stable,
Makes love with nods, and knees beneath a t ~ Alexander Pope

After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement. ~ Jules De Goncourt

And although it was in a hospital that she lay and I sat next to her - it is always that eternal poetry of Christmas night with the infant in the stable, as the old Dutch painters conceived it and MIllet and Breton - a light in the darkness, the brightness in the middle of a dark night. And so I hung a large etching after Rembrandt over it, the two women by the cradle, one of them reading from the Bible by candlelight, while the great shadows cast a deep chiaroscuro over the whole room. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

I wanted to be a poet. I had a really romantic idea about what that would mean. My parents knew some poets, and I liked how they dressed and acted, but I didn't really acknowledge that I only liked reading some bits of poetry while I was peeing or something. ~ Lena Dunham

She went from opera, park, assembly, play,
To morning walks, and prayers three hours a day.
To part her time 'twixt reading and bohea,
To muse, and spill her solitary tea,
Or o'er cold coffee trifle with the spoon,
Count the slow clock, and dine exact at noon. ~ Alexander Pope

[L]ike poems, cruising carves privacy out of public spaces. Poems are a kind of private communication that occurs in public speech. And I think cruising is that too: a training in reading occult codes; a way of seeing a significance in the world that most people don't see. ~ Garth Greenwell

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic. ~ Thom Gunn

The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity. ~ Donald Hall

The idea that a poem was a made thing stayed with me, and I decided then that I wanted to be an artist, not just a diarist. So I put myself through a kind of apprenticeship in writing poetry, and I understood even then that my practice as a poet was deeply related to my reading. ~ Edward Hirsch

You are either in a state of perfection or a state of learning. Reading is one of the best ways to learn about our lives and purpose! ~ Cupideros

Amber May | 4 comments Stories that make me cry
Tale that give me wing to fly
What lovely things, what beautiful words
So carefully crafted to be as sharp as swords
A book for the old, A book for the new
And my darling a book of me,I wrote for you.
I think I might turn this into a quote, if don't mind.
For some unsuspecting reader to find. ~ Amber May

Ho Kyuns poetry is in the tradition of his master, the incomparable Tu Fu, while remaining fully his own. Writing nine centuries later, Hos poetry strikes many parallels
the experiences of war and exile and constant struggle
and his voice is similarly humane. This is rich and enlightening reading. ~ Sam Hamill

The most beautiful videos
come from reading poetry.
And they're in your head. ~ Ruth Stone

When you find yourself writing, reading, or listening the delivery of words when spoken? You know the melody of wordplay. "& I love Wordplay ~ Elijah Cainaan

Summer in the trees! "It is time to strangle several bad poets." /
The yellow hobbyhorse rocks to and fro, and from the chimney / Drops the Strangler! The white and pink roses are slightly agitated by the struggle, / But afterwards beside the dead "poet" they cuddle up comfortingly against their vase. They are safer now, no one will compare them to the sea. /
Here on the railroad train, one more time, is the Strangler. / He is going to get that one there, who is on his way to a poetry reading. / Agh! Biff! A body falls to the moving floor. ~ Kenneth Koch

Spiritual reading, therefore, is slow, deliberate, meditative reading in which we allow the words to penetrate our heart and question our spirit. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

I was writing a poem, and suddenly, I fell asleep on a page.
I was dreaming of you. You were talking to me. I discovered that
you were all words and phrases.

Passion generated poetry, in which you were all the verses.
I was reading my book and found that you are all the pages.
كنت أكتب قصيدة , وفجأة, غفوت عليها.

كنت أحلم بك.
كنت تتحدث إلي بين
حروفي التي خطتها شفتيك
وأفقت على ضمتك لشوق كلماتي
وترجم صدرك تعابير الشغف
إلى عبارات
.
عشقي أنجب شعراً,
وأنت فيه كل الأبيات.

كنت أقرأ كتابي,
فوجدتك كل الصفحات ~ Amany Al-Hallaq

Most people in this country are looking for literature that is useful. They feel that just exploring their feelings is good enough - they should be reading about leveraged buy-outs or how to get thin. We live in a culture that is so absolutely, madly focused on commercialism and on creating money and completely turned away from any other kind of creative value. People don't generally turn to poetry unless they're bereaved or have fallen in love. Or in adolescence, when their feelings are very strong and turbulent. I think most of us are dying for lack of spirit in this culture. ~ Erica Jong