American Poet Quotes

My son called to me that God was inside his red fire engine. He wanted to show me. I did move as fast as I could, spilling like water through the kitchen door into a summer day, but God had left by the time I got there. My son smiled, told me I'd missed him by seconds.

The past is not only that which happened but also that which could have happened but did not.

How can I appreciate light from an aging
sun shining through new configurations neither pine
nor ash? How can I extol the nuturing
fragrances from the spires, the spicules
of a landscape not yet formed or seeded?

Right here in our bodies, in our defense of our right to experience joy, in the refusal to abandon the place where we have been most completely invaded & colonized, in our determination to make the bombed & defoliated lands flower again and bear fruit, here where we have been most shamed is one of the most radical & sacred places from which to transform the world.

Oh, a wondrous bird is the pelican!
His beak holds more than his belican.
He takes in his beak
Enough food for a week.
But I'll be darned if I know how the helican.

In the under-wood and the over-wood there is murmur and trill this day, For every bird is in lyric mood, And the wind will have its way.

Clinton Scollard
Clinton Scollard
The West for me means ambition, the East contentment. My heart is ever in one, my soul in the other.

Ameen Rihani
Ameen Rihani
The worst part of losing good fish is that you cannot release them. They tailwalk across the back of your mind for days.

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

Gerald Stern
Gerald Stern
If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can cross it if I try.

When you write, you can hide behind your words. When you talk, you are up front, like the clown in the midway booth; and passersby can bean you with a ball.

Willard R. Espy
Willard R. Espy
A weapon that comes down as still
As snowflakes fall upon the sod;
But executes a freeman's will,
As lightning does the will of God;
And from its force nor doors nor locks
Can shield you,—'t is the ballot-box.

John Pierpont
John Pierpont
All the things we hide in water
Hoping we won't see them go.
Forests growing under water
Press against the ones we know.

There are rituals not structures for being a poet, drinking too much, taking too many drugs, being a lady chaser, having your nervous breakdown, being irresponsible about money.

Diane Wakoski
Diane Wakoski
A man's motive in the small actions of daily life, like resting a moment on his pitchfork in the sun and listening intently, may be the most important thing about that man.

The splendor of Silence,—of snow-jeweled hills and of ice.

'THIS ROOM HAS MYSTERY LIKE A TRANCE' This room has mystery like a trance Of wine ; forget-me-nots of you Are chair and couch, the books your Fingers touched. And now that you Are absent here the silence scrapes A secret rust from everything; While sudden wreaths of sorrow's Dust uncover emptiness like halls To stumble through, and terror falls

Kenneth Patchen
Kenneth Patchen
I believe if I should die,
And you should kiss my eyelids where I lie
Cold, dead, and dumb to all the world contains,
The folded orbs would open at thy breath,
And from its exile in the Isles of Death
Life would come gladly back along my veins.

I need to feel that the language in my poems is alive, in the sense of talking on the phone to a friend sharing gossip.

We, poet and magic myth-making Giant of Song, wander on. Holy the bones of our ancestors wrapped in Pyramids resting 'til the end of Time Holy the Magi, priests and Myth-scientists of Africa for sending him to us.

This is not what I meant to keep
I thought of bitter-bright rememberings
pressed petals of forget—me—nots
or once-bold daffodils
not this hardness,
not
these bitter stalks of
weeds

I am like a table
that eats its own legs off
because it's fallen
in love with the floor.

A million butterflies rose up from South America, All together, and flew in a gold storm toward Spain...

If a poet has any obligation toward society, it is to write well. Being in the minority, he has no other choice. Failing this duty, he sinks into oblivion. Society, on the other hand, has no obligation toward the poet.

Joseph Brodsky
Joseph Brodsky
Painters have often taught writers how to see.

James Baldwin
James Baldwin