American Poet Quotes

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 writer who is a mother should, I think, record everything she can: make notes, keep journals, take photographs, use a tape recorder, and remind herself that there is a subject so incalculably vast significance to humanity, about which virtually nothing is known because writers have not been mothers.

Alicia Ostriker
Alicia Ostriker
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.

Ireland regards sex, when she regards it at all, with an entirely primitive and practical eye.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

the Revolution aint dead
its tired,
and jest resting.

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

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

In the morning I get out of bed, I brush my teeth, I wash my face, I get dressed in the clothes I like best. I want to be good to myself.

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

Lincoln Kirstein
Lincoln Kirstein
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.

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

Three hundred years we slaved,
We slave and suffer yet;
Though flesh and bone rebel,
They tell us to forget!

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

Live blindly and upon the hour. The Lord,
Who was the Future, died full long ago.
Knowledge which is the Past is folly.

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