20th-century Poet Quotes

Every vivid memory holds some essential truth about your vision of the world

For a woman to be a lesbian in a male-supremacist, capitalist, misogynist, racist, homophobic, imperialist culture, such as that of North America, is an act of resistance.

Strange with women when They find out you love men More than they Never let you kiss them On the mouth again.

When you win, we win; but when you go down, you go down alone.

Basked in the sun,listened to birds,licked off raindrops,and only in flightthe leaf saw the treeand graspedwhat it had been.

As a favor to me
Let's not talk any more about old dances.
I have an entire world on the tip of my tongue.

Cornelius Eady
Cornelius Eady
It's horrifying how fast time flies. It's cold. No rain today. A strong wind. Walked around a lot, slept a lot. I've been sleeping 12–14 hours a day. Maybe that's why time is galloping by so fast.

Igor Kholin
Igor Kholin
Those four black girls blown up
in that Alabama church
remind me of five hundred
middle passage blacks,
in a net, under water
in Charleston harbor
so redcoats wouldn't find them.
Can't find what you can't see
can you?

I like people who possess either deep mastery or deep empathy, but not as much as I like those who possess both.

I will garden on the double run,
my rhythm obvious in the ringing rakes,
and trust in fate to keep me poor and kind
and work until my heart is short,
then go out slowly with a feeble grin,
my fingers flexing but my eyes gone gray
from cramps and the lack of oxygen.

you and Caribbea are one in us.
you are Caribbea!

Let me leap naked through life's testing flame, And bear to lose, and yet endure to win.

The first few glasses of beer were a revelation; they flushed my veins with happiness; they washed away all cares and shyness and worries. I remember thinking to myself, If I could have two pints of beer every afternoon, life would be a great happiness.

Poetry, I'm returning to it, never leaves me. It's my genre completely. In poetry I contemplate myself exuberantly. It's my unique strength. Force of gravity, electric and magnetic energy; in my own way, to make a synthesis.

Nicole Brossard
Nicole Brossard
Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys.

Why are you not where you belong? / A black hat on a hook says nothing. / Ashes mirror ashes / In a mirroring window.

Mary Jo Bang
Mary Jo Bang
I admit that most of my records are silly, but they do require serious training.

Ashrita Furman
Ashrita Furman
Dem half o' dis an half o'dat
Dem neida dose nor dese—
So since dem half-an half, dem choice
Watever side dem please.

The closure of the book is an illusion largely created by its materiality, its cover. Once the book is considered on the plane of its significance, it threatens infinity.

So often we measure
by what is false.
We should measure
by what is barely legible
barely in our dailiness.
It is the invisible that doesn't lie
the invisible through which
we see ourselves finally
on a back street in the world.

My mind is lovely as a spruce, and I and those that love me make it mine.

Michael McClure
Michael McClure
You can always spot bright people. They are reading a book.

Gary Soto
Gary Soto
Look, friend, at this universe With its spiral clusters of stars Flying out all over space Like bedsprings suddenly bursting free;

up from new Orleans, on riverboats
from the gulf of mexico, memory carries
sweet legacy of niggerland speech, brown tongue bluesing
muddy water
underbottomed spirits crawling, nightmares
of shipwrecked bones, bones gone home to stone, to stone
bones gone home to stone, to stone
riverbottomed, underbellied spirits

I hear the clack — who cast the dice on the bathroom tiles?

Yiannis Ritsos
Yiannis Ritsos