American Poet Quotes

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

Trumbull Stickney

All the things we hide in water
Hoping we won't see them go.
Forests growing under water
Press against the ones we know.

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

Susan Polis Schutz

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.

Ultimately I have learned more about poetry, from music and magic than from literature.

James Broughton

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course you're tired. Every atom in you has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes nonstop from mitosis to now. Quit tapping your feet. They'll dance inside themselves without you.

Albert Goldbarth

Even
After
All this time
The Sun never says to the Earth, "You owe me." Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.

Daniel Ladinsky

I am called "Venus Hottentot."
I left Capetown with a promise
of revenue: half the profits
and my passage home: A boon!
Master's brother proposed the trip;
the magistrate granted me leave
I would return to my family
a duchess, with watered-silk
dresses and money to grow food.

Elizabeth Alexander (poet)

In the broken down car
They jounce up and down
Pretend to be steering
On the way to town.
It's as far as they'll get
For many a year;
Cotton brought them
And will keep them here.

Sterling Allen Brown

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

It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.

William Stafford (poet)

My boyhood saw
Greek islands floating over Harvard Square.

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

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

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.

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

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

I can hear the sizzle of newborn stars, and know anything of meaning, of the fierce magic emerging here. I am witness to flexible eternity, the evolving past, and I know we will live forever, as dust or breath in the face of stars, in the shifting pattern of winds.

It is easy to be humble when a greater is preferred; but when an inferior is lifted high above our heads, how can we bear it?

Constance Fenimore Woolson

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

A poem is a box, a thing, to put other things in. For safe keeping.

Marianne Boruch

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

Girl, when he gives you kisses twain, use one, and let the other stay; And hoard it, for moons die, red fades, and you may need a kiss—some day.

Ridgely Torrence

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