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.

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

James Galvin (poet)

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

I'm sorry I cannot say I love you when you say you love me. The words, like moist fingers, appear before me full of promise but then run away to a narrow black room that is always dark, where they are silent, elegant, like antique gold, devouring the thing I feel.

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

Naomi Long Madgett

And the sun had on a crown
Wrought of gilded thistledown,
And a scarf of velvet vapor
And a raveled rainbow gown;
And his tinsel-tangled hair
Tossed and lost upon the air
Was glossier and flossier
Than any anywhere.

James Whitcomb Riley

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

Let not my death be long,
But light
As a bird's swinging;
Happy decision in the height
Of song —
Then flight
From off the ultimate bough!
And let my wing be strong,
And my last note the first
Of another's singing.
See to it, Thou!

The morning-glory's blossoming will soon be coming round; We see their rows of heart-shaped leaves upspringing from the ground.

Maria White Lowell

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

She sees herself with her long hair floating,
floating in the atmosphere of stardust.
She rides her planet the way a child rides a toy.
Her company is the boy who takes the sun on its daily journey,
and the man in the moon smiles as she passes by.

I had a perfect confidence, still unshaken, in books. If you read enough you would reach the point of no return. You would cross over and arrive on the safe side. There you would drink the strong waters and become addicted, perhaps demented - but a Reader.

Helen Bevington

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.

Askia M. Touré

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

Before you go further,
let me tell you what a poem brings,
first, you must know the secret, there is no poem
to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries...

Juan Felipe Herrera

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.

Darlings of the forest! Blossoming alone When Earth's grief is sorest For her jewels gone - Ere the last snow-drift melts, your tender buds have blown.

Rose Terry Cooke

You should speak out because if you don't, it's going to harm you.

Claudia Rankine

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.

A book is kind because its pages let us know when it is coming to an end.

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