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?

Pattiann Rogers

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.

Aurora Levins Morales

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.

Dixon Lanier Merritt

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

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

Ingram Crockett

If you have enough breath to complain about anything, you have more than enough reason to give thanks about something.

Mattie Stepanek

Where is the heart that doth not keep,
Within its inmost core,
Some fond remembrance hidden deep,
Of days that are no more?

Ellen Clementine Howarth

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

And for a minute, maybe longer... everything that threatens us, threatens to save us.

James Galvin (poet)

'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

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

Winfield Townley Scott

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.

Deborah Garrison

The candid camera is the greatest liar in the photographic family.... It is anarchic, naïve, and superficial.

Lincoln Kirstein

Chemistry having its equations beyond our range of inequation.

Robert Duncan (poet)

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

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.

Mary Ashley Townsend

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.

Painters have often taught writers how to see.