Quotes about poem

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“Every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.”

“Love the earth and sun and animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others…
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.”

“the poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople… you and i are human beings; mostpeople are snobs.”

“Dark is a way and light is a place,
Heaven that never was
Nor will be ever is always true
"Poem on His Birthday”

“No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.”

“Unfinished Poem
I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.”

“Backward we traveled to reclaim the day
Before we fell, like Icarus, undone;
All we find are altars in decay
And profane words scrawled black across the sun.

--From the poem "Doom of the Exiles", written 16 April 1954”

“A living poem" had always been the words that came to mind when he tried to describe her to others.”

“When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.”

“We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.”

“The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully.”

“He stepped back and threw his arms out.
"I'm always crazy around you Rose. Here, I'm going to write an impromptu poem for you."
He tipped his head back and shouted to the sky:
"Rose is in red
But never in blue
Sharp as a thorn
Fights like one too.”

“You write poems
because you need
a place
where what isn’t may be”

“A poem…begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words.”

“No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book, or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.”

“Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem.”

“I have met with women whom I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel.”

“One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.”

“You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.”

“If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.”

“I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.”

“I have bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea…
Devouring the green azures.”

“Most people are much better at saying things in letters than in conversation, and some people can write artistic, inventive letters, but when they try a poem or story or novel they become pretentious.”

“in the street of the sky night walks scattering poems”

“The only difference between me and others is that they think they can change something with cute little poems, nice cards or embracing trees and being nice to little lapdogs.”

“I believe everyone has this fuckin' poem in his heart.”

“The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstacy is holy!”

“The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that's saying a lot.”

“There's a time for reciting poems and a time for fists. As far as I was concerned, this was the latter.”

“Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. How much blood, how many tears in exchange for these axes, these muzzles, these unicorns, these torches, these towers, these martlets, these seedlings of stars and these fields of blue!”

“Clouds are poems, and the most moving poems linger on the blackboard so long, written in cursive so lovely, they also exist inside our fingertips. We never really erase them at the end of the lesson.”

“The major problem of life is learning how to handle the costly interruptions. The door that slams shut, the plan that got sidetracked, the marriage that failed. Or that lovely poem that didn't get written because someone knocked on the door.”

“There's two kinds of women--those you write poems about and those you don't.”

“It is raining. I am tempted to write a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.”

“Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.”

“Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.”

“The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things, she decided, wondering how many writers and philosophers had said this before her, the trivial pleasures like cooking, one's home, little poems especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard.”

“a poem is a naked person... some people say that I am a poet”

“She was not a poet. She was a poem.”

“No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.”

“How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)”

“If I wasn't writing poems, I'd be washing my hands all the time.”

“No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.”

“I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.

--From the poem "Mad Girl's Love Song”

“Shaw… has a woman ever asked you to write a poem for her?"
"Good God, no," Gideon replied with a snicker. "Shaws don't write poetry. They pay others to write it for them and then take the credit for it.”

“Writers don't write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don't…. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.”

“I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring - I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house.”

“Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you”

“I sit in my tree
I sing like the birds
My beak is my pen
My songs are my poems.”

“A Poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Grown-up

Was it for this I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight?”

“Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all theof that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew.”

“Now that I have lost you I cannot allow you to develop, you must be a photograph not a poem.”

“The Beautiful Poem"

I go to bed in Los Angeles thinking
about you.

Pissing a few moments ago
I looked down at my penis
affectionately.

Knowing it has been inside
you twice today makes me
feel beautiful.”

“It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.”

“This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.”

“A poem by Margot Bickel

A little peace
within the last hours of the almost bygone day
a little silence
between the days
so that the nascent yesterday does not get in the past
and tomorrow is lived for today”

“It is not everyday that the world arranges itself into a poem.”

“She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.”

“Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems.”

“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.”

“A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.”

“Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.”

“There is nothing we should be quite so grateful for as the last line of the poem that goes, 'When your own heart asks.”

“I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.”

“Maybe you're one of those people who writes poems, but rarely reads them. Let me put this as delicately as I can: If you don't read, your writing is going to suck.”

“Every poem holds the unspeakable inside it. The unsayable… The thing that you can't really say because it's too complicated. It's too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.”

“I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.”

“Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril.”

“I thought I'd begin by reading a poem by Shakespeare, but then I thought, why should I? He never reads any of mine.”

“A poem is like a score for the human voice.”

“I once broke up with a boy because he wrote me an awful poem.”

“That's how it is with relationships, it's a part of life, and all the great love songs and poems and films have been written by people who were standing where I was that morning as Simon shut the door. Doesn't make it any easier though.”

“Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope.”

“Reading a poem in translation is like kissing a woman through a veil.”

“If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.”

“When I first read the dictionary, I thought it was a long poem about everything.”

“You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.”

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end.”

“You should always be trying to write a poem you are unable to write, a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you're merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that's always easiest.”

“To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie—
True Poems flee”

“Wherever you are, at any moment, try and find something beautiful. A face, a line out of a poem, the clouds out of a window, some graffiti, a wind farm. Beauty cleans the mind.”

“He found himself wanting to write poetry about how her blue eyes were like starlight and her hair like night, because "night" and "starlight" rhymed, but he had a feeling the poem wouldn't turn out that well…”

“Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes indeed.”

“Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you/ That you may be my poem/ I whisper with my lips close to your ear/ I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.”

“Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-haired child.”

“You will have a story in there… or a character, a place, a poem, a moment in time. When you find it, you will write it. Word after word after word after word.”

“Always learn poems by heart. They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay.”

“I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a hot-gushing, butt-cramping, gut hosing orgasm.”

“All girls should have a poem
written for them even if
we have to turn this God-damn world
upside down to do it.”

“Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.”

“The moment of change is the only poem.”

“You're always believing ahead of your evidence. What was the evidence I could write a poem? I just believed it. The most creative thing in us is to believe in a thing.”

“Atque in pepetuum, frater, ave atque vale,” he whispered. The words of the poem had never seemed so fitting: Forever and ever, my brother, hail and farewell.”

“People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

From the poem "Sheep in Fog", 2 December 1962, 28 January 1963”

“Every word was once a poem.”

“That girl will rain destruction down on you and your ship. She is an albatross, Captain.

Way I remember it, albatross was a ship's good luck, 'til some idiot killed it. (to Inara) Yes, I've read a poem. Try not to faint.”

“It is difficult
to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack”

“I am too pure for you or anyone.

From the poem "Fever 103°", 20 October 1962”

“I thought about one of my favorite Sufi poems, which says that God long ago drew a circle in the sand exactly around the spot where you are standing right now. I was never not coming here. This was never not going to happen.”