20th-century Poet Quotes

This is the black, shot with blue, of my dark
daddy's knuckles, that do not change, ever. Which is to say they are no more pale
in anger than at rest, or when, as
I imagine them now, they follow
the same two fingers he has always used
to make the rim of every empty blue
glass in the house sing. Always, the same blue-to-black sorrow no black surface can entirely hide.

Words are the gateway to reality, the means by which we engage with the objective truth beyond ourselves.

If — struggling and trouble-stricken —
I still try to do something and work
— as well as possible —
then it is in order that anybody shall be allowed
to do his work in freedom,
that he shall not be harmed, or suffer violence,
nor false charges be brought against him,
in order that
this little Hungary
shall one day become a real Homeland,
the country of its nation.

Benjámin László

I'm sorry I cannot say I love you when you say you love me. The words, like moist fingers, appear before me full of promise but then run away to a narrow black room that is always dark, where they are silent, elegant, like antique gold, devouring the thing I feel.

She sees herself with her long hair floating,
floating in the atmosphere of stardust.
She rides her planet the way a child rides a toy.
Her company is the boy who takes the sun on its daily journey,
and the man in the moon smiles as she passes by.

Destiny can sometimes be history coming back to bite you in the arse.

The artesian well of joy never runs dry. We clog it with our thoughts.

At a department store in Kyoto One of my friends bought a beetle For his son, seven years old. A few hours later The boy brought his dead bug To a hardware store, asking "Change battery please."

You can't drive to the coastline. You can only drive so close to the white chalky cliff and then you have to get out and dive.

Joyelle McSweeney

It's true, the grave is more powerful than a lover's eyes. An open grave, with all its magnets. And I say this to you, you who when you smile make me think of the beginning of the world.

Vicente Huidobro

Why did I buy it? What was I thinking? It's all wrong. Tacky, but not in a good way. It looks suburban. It spells housewife. Too nurturing. I don't even have kids. No one will take me seriously. It must have been the lighting. I was in a hurry. I don't even want to return it. Just get it out of here. Throw it away.

Retiring to the canopy of the bedroom, turning on the bedside light, taking the big dictionary to bed, clutching the unabridged bulk, heavy with the weight of all the meanings between these covers, smoothing the thin sheets, thick with accented syllables—all are exercises in the conscious regimen of dreamers, who toss words on their tongues while turning illuminated pages.

Harryette Mullen

A fastened woman
can be messed with, one too many times.

I wanted to be born at the farthest limit of the world. I'll explore it, I said to myself, biting big chunks from it. And when I want, I'll go straight to the core. This is the way of the world I thought in my innocence, round and around the layers of peel until the taste becomes certain.

The sharp knife of dawn glitters in my hand but how bare is everything-tall tall tree infinite air, the unrelaxing tension of the world and only hope, hope only, the kind eagle soars and wheels in flight.

Someone Should Write Me a Love Poem but I'm Stuck Doing It Myself

Daphne Gottlieb

I will look at the footprints going in and out of the water and dream up a small blue good to talk to.

What I do remember has never left my recall. On the other hand, what I have forgotten, I forgot with amazing swiftness: inside a week, and it was all gone. Moreover, it has remained safely tucked away. It doesn't haunt me. And for that, I am truly grateful.

I loved a woman whose beauty Like the moon moved all the humming heavens to music till the stars with their tiny teeth burst into song and I fell on the ground before her while the sky hardened and she laughed and turned me down softly, I was so young.

An updated notion of genius would have to center around one's mastery of information and its dissemination.

Kenneth Goldsmith

For should your hands drop white and empty
All the toys of the world would break.

John Frederick Nims

If you work hard enough at something, it begins to make itself part of you, even though you do not really like it and know that part isn't real.

What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

The sea raises you to your feet. And dead calm.
Strands of light hold your hand. Now you have left
this shore. Now you are in the wind of an invisible sail.

The Sun! The Sun! a fish in the aquarium of sky or golden net to snare the butterfly of soul or else the hole through which stars have disappeared...