Urban Poetry Quotes

The rhyme pad was a spell book - it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

And all the stars in the deep blue sky are the tears of the moon; the ones he cried while dreaming about the sun. ~ Laura Chouette

If I could change the attitude of young men toward literature, I would want them to read not just for escape, but because literature can be more truthful about things like sex, commitment, and aging. It can be more truthful about the stuff that our parents lied to us (and themselves) about, and the stuff that everyone has to lie about. It can all be dealt with truthfully in fiction and poetry. ~ Lorin Stein

LIFE
IS THE ART
OF FAILING
MAGNIFICENTLY. ~ Atticus Poetry

You know you possess the soul of an artist when, each time you sit down to create, the whole universe lays itself at your feet. ~ Eric Micha'el Leventhal

Pierre, who knew she was very stupid, sometimes attended, with a strange feeling of perplexity and fear, her evenings and dinner parties, where politics, poetry, and philosophy were discussed. At ~ Leo Tolstoy

Sometimes we find the sweetest solidarity in the midst of solitude. ~ Curtis Tyrone Jones

Planners and designers should encourage as much diversity in human habitats as they find in animal habitats. It is not possible to resolve all conflicts or to gain all ends. Choices have to be made. Different aspects of the public good should be stressed in different places. To achieve variety in land use patterns, there should also be a variety of relationships between the professions, not an institutionalized decision-making tree. Relationships between the constructive professions should, therefore, be deconstructed. ~ Tom Turner

From the first note I knew it was different from anything I had ever heard.... It began simply, but with an arresting phrase, so simple, but eloquent as a human voice. It spoke, beckoning gently as it unwound, rising and tensing. It spiraled upward, the tension growing with each repeat of the phrasing, and yet somehow it grew more abandoned, wilder with each note. His eyes remained closed as his fingers flew over the strings, spilling forth surely more notes than were possible from a single violin. For one mad moment I actually thought there were more of them, an entire orchestra of violins spilling out of this one instrument. I had never heard anything like it--it was poetry and seduction and light and shadow and every other contradiction I could think of. It seemed impossible to breathe while listening to that music, and yet all I was doing was breathing, quite heavily. The music itself had become as palpable a presence in that room as another person would have been--and its presence was something out of myth. ~ Deanna Raybourn

The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives ~ Anne Sexton

In a meadow full of flowers, you cannot walk through and breathe those smells and see all those colors and remain angry. We have to support the beauty, the poetry, of life. ~ Jonas Mekas

I ain't nobody's sidekick.
I AM Batman
And Robin,
minus the mask, plus the vagina. ~ Casey Renee Kiser

The cells in your body are completely loyal to you; they work for you in harmony. We can even say they pray to you. You are their God. That is absolutely the truth. Now what are you going to do with this knowledge? ~ Miguel Ruiz

She was desperate,
she was deathless. I'd have followed her
anywhere she asked of me. I'd have
thrown myself to the wild for her. ~ Elisabeth Hewer

If poetry is a circus, then the Big Tent we're under has to have room for a lot of different freak shows. ~ Alan DeNiro

I never seem to have any level of restraint with you, woman. ~ Brynn Myers

So, poetry becomes a means for useful dialogue between people who are not only unknown, but mute to each other. It produces a dialogue among people that guards all of us against manipulation by our so-called leaders. ~ June Jordan

In a rich moonlit garden, flowers open beneath the eyes of entire nations terrified to acknowledge the simplicity of the beauty of peace. ~ Aberjhani

As he took her hand
he gave her
all she had been
waiting for--
a shiver
down her spine. ~ Atticus Poetry

More often than what you're suggesting, I find people are surprised that I have an urban side to me. ~ Ashley Judd

One must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one's own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others ~ Allen Ginsberg

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture. ~ Ezra Pound

Nor mourn, O living One, because her part in life was mourning:
Would she have lost the poet's fire for the anguish of the burning?
The minstrel harp, for the strained string? tripod for the afflated
Woe, or the vision, for those tears in which it shone dilated? ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

But I am like the grass, I can not love you. ~ Ezra Pound

The chaos of the mind cannot constitute a reply to the providence of the universe. All it can be is an awakening in the night, where all that can be heard is anguished poetry let loose. ~ Georges Bataille

the saddest thing is to be
a minute to someone,
when you've made them your eternity. ~ Sanober Khan

As it turns out, craft is to poetry what invention is to imagination--not antithetical, but needless. The eye does not invent the light; there's no need. The mind makes no materials; it doesn't have to. Imagination is the present state of things, and poems rejoice--in particular, in detail--that this is so. Again, the only work is trust, a trust rewarded by ease and by betterment. ~ Donald Revell

When you're a student of poetry, you're lucky if you don't realize how untalented you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop. ~ Tony Hoagland

Beauty is so rare a th
Sing a new song
Real
Music
A busted flush. A pain in the eyebrows. A
Visiting card
- from 15 False Propositions Against God [1958] ~ Jack Spicer

Having experimented in both poetry and prose, I can say that the two are such loaded words. But neither are quite as weighted as the word "poet". I think some people can write poetry their whole lives, and never truly BE a "poet". Whereas I see poets in the wanderers I encounter, the baristas who serve me, and the truckers I, so, love to talk to.To be a poet in my humble opinion is to be a muse of the human experience. I love that I love the idea, that anything can be poetry, it can't be defined. It's a feeling, like punk rock. I'm not one for form or structure. I say if your words are visceral and honest, it's poetry. If you see the beauty of the world and humanity, and you preach it, you're a poet. ~ Mallory Smart

I stopped telling you
all of my secrets
when you became
my biggest one. ~ Heather Angelika Dooley

The true poetic feeling is a feeling of boundless gratitude. ~ Marty Rubin

Anyone who sees the realism in Lynch truly understand poetry! ~ Armond White

In my religion, there would be no exclusive doctrine; all would be love, poetry, and doubt. ~ Cyril Connolly

I really think that everyone should have watercolors, magnetic poetry, and a harmonica. ~ Stephen Chbosky