20th-century Poet Quotes

We consider the artist a special sort of person. It is more likely that each of us is a special sort of artist.

Wires instead of veins. that's what writers are made of. We get these electric demands & if we don't co-operate, we don't get to go to sleep. wired. Coffee nerves without the coffee.

then bite the tongue out by the root…
and chew, never swallow.
This is not sex, remember;
you are eating the sea.

Robin Robertson

Euryalus, is it
the gods who put this fire in our minds,
or is it that each man's relentless longing
becomes a god to him?

Allen Mandelbaum

The combination of song, prayer, and poetry is a natural form of expression for many Navajo people. A person who is able to 'talk beautifully' is well thought of and considered wealthy...

Meningitis. It was a word you had to bite on to say it. It had a fright and a hiss in it.

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course you're tired. Every atom in you has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes nonstop from mitosis to now. Quit tapping your feet. They'll dance inside themselves without you.

Albert Goldbarth

A poem is a box, a thing, to put other things in. For safe keeping.

Marianne Boruch

A slow psalm of two nations
Mourning a common pain
—Hebrew and Arabic mingling
Their silver-rooted vine;
Olives and roses falling
To sweeten Palestine.

Little brown boy,
Slim, dark, big-eyed,
Crooning love songs to your banjo
Down at the Lafayette—Gee, boy, I love the way you hold your head,
High sort of and a bit to one side,
Like a prince, a jazz prince.

We would be strangers in the Capitol;
this is our country also, no-where else;
and we shall not be outcast on the world.

Languages are not owned
by nations but by the people who use them
and make them live.

Abdourahman Waberi

Maybe we all want to burn off across the horizon, into space, perhaps, to take off into some unknown territory and meet ourselves out there.

The treasures of Cathay were never found.
In this America, this wilderness
Where the axe echoes with a lonely sound,
The generations labor to possess
And grave by grave we civilize the ground.

My writing has made me a redundant human being.

Let all Black Poets die as trumpets,
And be buried in the dust of marching feet.

Etheridge Knight

The clouds roll on. Silent as sleepwalkers the clouds keep coming from infinity bank behind bank and line after line, and change colors on the earth.

Rolf Jacobsen (poet)

Ask a glass of water why it pities
the rain. Ask the lunatic yard dog why it tolerates the leash.

Chemistry having its equations beyond our range of inequation.

Robert Duncan (poet)

Someone spoke to me last night,
told me the truth. Just a few words,
but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.

As we remember Abbott and Costello,
As Laurel and Hardy can never die,
Rowan and Martin will not be forgot,
But baby we sure gonna try.

Who owns this landscape?
The millionaire who bought it or
the poacher staggering downhill in the early morning
with a deer on his back?

The tribal attitude said, and continues to say, that Gay people are especially empowered because we are able to identify with both sexes and can see into more than one world at once, having the capacity to see from more than one point of view at a time. And that is also an Indian way of seeing.

Let's kneel down through all the worlds of the body like lovers. I know I am a tree and full of life and I know you, you are the flying one and will leave. But can't we swallow the sweetness and can't you sing in my arms and sleep in the human light of the sun and moon I have been drinking alone.

Simply by sailing in a new direction
You could enlarge the world.