20th-century Poet Quotes

The soul inside me is the last foreign language I'm learning,

First, a poem must be magical, then musical as a sea-gull and it must hold fire as well.

Jose Garcia Villa

The person who wrote the poem can tell you more about the poem than anyone else.

Map age genes place of origin
and love's lineaments. For mapped onto each body is love. Carthography of one's own country
or the contours of a foreign land

As I stood on the lonely backroad, I'm sure I heard birds, kookaburras, laughing...

And the faith that grows out of questioning is stronger than the faith born of blind acceptance. It can withstand the shocks of circumstance. Only he who questions the universe and questions it in utter honesty can grow in his comprehension of the truth.

James Dillet Freeman

I like to make the reader laugh — and then steal that laugh, right out of the throat. Because I think life is like that, tragedy right alongside humor.

I am firmly convinced that all art will become dadaistic in the course of time, because from Dada proceeds the perpetual urge for its renovation.

Richard Huelsenbeck

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.

I have so fiercely dreamed of you And walked so far and spoken of you so, Loved a shade of you so hard That now I've no more left of you.

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

It was only my second night in Africa, yet something had begun to grow inside me which I could not stop, as if my childhood dreams had finally found the place where they could materialize. I had arrived where I was always meant to be. I did not know how it could be practically achieved, but I was certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that it was here that I wanted to live.

I was raised to feel that doing nothing was a sin. I had to learn to do nothing.

But when Johnny goes out
on Johnny's own Time he's out there doing the only one thing: he's burning off all the stillborn Johnnys that hatched in his head in the night.
And that John, he won't ever come home, not until he's right.

August Kleinzahler

One constant in a world of variables - a man alone in the evening in his patch of vegetables. and all the things he takes down with him there, where the easement runs along the back fence.

Q: Rain was always a favorite theme?
Levine: Rain was my first, and I guess, a constant theme. But things like wind in the winter, the trees, and my sense of relationship with them. You could actually see the stars, we were on the outskirts of Detroit, there were no factories around. So you could see the stars and, oh the world is, you know, a cosmos, is immense.

Dusk over the lake,
clouds floating
heat lightning
a nightmare behind branches

Even the simplest poem
May destroy your immunity to human emotions.
All poems must carry a Government warning. Words
Can seriously affect your heart.

You are made of bent coat hangers, honey, gravel, epoxy and handstands. I am made of lying on the floor, the same song on repeat.

Dean Young (poet)

Down under we send soldiers and wool abroad but keep poets and wine at home.

John Streeter Manifold

Imagine how they stood there, what they stood with
that their possessions may become our power.
Cardboard. Iron. Their hardships parcelled in them.

It is remarkable, in cats, that the outer life they reveal to their masters is one of perpetual boredom.

But the summits of poetry are mysteries; they are shiftingly veiled, and those who catch the glimpses see different aspects of the transcendental; but they have seen something, and they come down with the glory lingering on them.

Old and ruined, all rotted and broken up These plum trees function gorgeously A few days every year In a way nobody else does.

Even
After
All this time
The Sun never says to the Earth, "You owe me." Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.

Daniel Ladinsky