American Poet Quotes

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!

The person who wrote the poem can tell you more about the poem than anyone else.

Just stand aside and watch yourself go by; Think of yourself as 'he' instead of 'I'.

Strickland Gillilan

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.

Is it not clear that a reviewer's psyche, like an iceberg, is seven-eighths beneath the surface?

Delmore Schwartz

Collating bones: I would have liked to do. Henry would have been hot at that. I missed his profession. As a little boy I always thought "I'm an archaeologist"; who Could be more respected peaceful serious than that?

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

ABOMUNISTS JOIN NOTHING BUT THEIR HANDS OR LEGS, OR OTHER SAME.

Uniformity, in its motives, its goals, its far-ranging consequences, is the natural enemy of poetry, not to mention the enemy of trees, the soil, the exemplary life therein.

Carolyn D. Wright

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

Oh, hear Him within you speaking this infinite love, moving like some divine and audible leaven, lifting the sky of the soul with expansions of light, shaping new heights and new depths, and, at your stir of assent, spreading the mountains with flame, filling the hollows with Heaven.

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

No pent-up Utica contracts your powers,
But the whole boundless continent is yours.

Jonathan M. Sewall

If I find it painful getting out of bed in the morning, I am likely to find it harder still in five years' time. Then you have to add that, though that is undoubtedly so, it is also quite possible that you won't be there in five years.

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

Who says there's just one safe way to walk, one road properly lit, and the rest - all slippery water, unmarked?

In the false country of the zoo
Grief is well represented there
From those continents of the odd
And outmoded, Africa and Australia.

My best performances were when I was 30 years old, and I was a vegan.

Don't compare yourself to anyone. Be happy to be the wonder unique, very special person that you are.

Susan Polis Schutz

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

I'm beginning to think that our species is a mistake of nature.

Do they miss me at home, do they miss me?
'T would be an assurance most dear
To know that this moment some loved one
Was saying, 'Oh were she but here!'

Caroline Atherton Mason

As I was going up the stair I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. I wish, I wish he'd stay away.

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.

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