American Poet Quotes

If history is a record of survivors, Poetry shelters other voices.

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

Christopher Camuto

By the power of eloquence old truth receives a new habit; though its essence be the same, yet its visage is so altered that it may currently pass and be accepted as a novelty.

Michael Wigglesworth

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

Mattie Stepanek

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

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.

I know the difference between
what it is and what it isn't.
Just because I can't touch it
doesn't mean it isn't real.
All I have to do is smash the screen,
reach in and take what I want.
Break out of prison.
South Central homey's newly risen
from the night of living dead,
but this time he lives,
he gets to give the zombies
a taste of their own medicine.

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

James Galvin (poet)

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.

Matthew Dickman

I'm saying that the domain of poetry includes both oral & written forms, that poetry goes back to a pre-literate situation & would survive a post-literate situation, that human speech is a near-endless source of poetic forms, that there has always been more oral than written poetry, & that we can no longer pretend to a knowledge of poetry if we deny its oral dimension.

Jerome Rothenberg

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

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

Oh I'm in love with the janitor's boy,
And the janitor's boy loves me;
He's going to hunt for a desert isle
In our geography.

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

John Frederick Nims

I don't believe in laying to rest the past. There are wounds we won't get over. There are things that happen to us that, no matter how hard we try to forget, no matter with what fortitude we face them, what mix of religion and therapy we swallow, what finished and durable forms of art we turn them into, are going to go on happening inside of us for as long as our brains are alive.

Christian Wiman

Sometimes I come here just to be a lost mariner
but I am never lost:
there are the snowflakes frozen to the porthole of a jewelry store,
here is the treasure chest open to a single pearl
laid on a velvet slab,
there is the plashing of faces in the aisles
and the row of lockers stuffed with the coats and hats of the drowned
and it is night, and the moon rows over
the gentle waters of the parking lot.

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.

Here's to the wind blowing against this lighted house and to the vast, windless spaces between the stars.

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

Out in the lonely woods the jasmine burns Its fragrant lamps, and turns Into a royal court with green festoons The banks of dark lagoons.

But when the conquered spirit breaks free And indicates a new light Who'll take care of the cats?

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.

And you, whiner, who wastes your time
Dawdling over the remorseless earth,
What evil, what unspeakable crime
Have you made your life worth?

W. D. Snodgrass

As I get older, I recognize that my thinking about poetry may or
may not have anything actively to do with my actual work as a
poet. This strikes me as no thing cynically awry but rather
seems again instance of that hapless or possibly happy fact,
we do not as humans seem necessarily aware of what we are
physically or psychically doing at all!

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