American Poet Quotes

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.

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

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

Niagara! Wonder of this western world, And half the world beside! Hail, beauteous queen Of cataracts!

Maria Gowen Brooks

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

Individualism and mobility are at the core of American identity

My precious child, I love you and will never leave you
Never, ever, during your trials and testings.
When you saw only one set of footprints,
It was then that I carried you.

Margaret Fishback

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

the Revolution aint dead
its tired,
and jest resting.

Carolyn Rodgers

Clear and simple in white and gold, Meadows blossom, of sunlit spaces, - The field is full as it well can hold And white with the drift of the ox-eye daisies!

Dora Read Goodale

Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you've the chance.

Be-Bop is precise clumsiness
Awkward lyricism
under a feather's control.
A world in a crack.

Sterling D. Plumpp

Who do you serve? Do you serve somebody?
I serve the poem, no one.

As for the common men apart, Who sweat to keep their common breath, And have no hour for books or art-- What dreams have these to hide from death!

When we neglect the artist in ourselves, there is a kind of mourning that goes on under the surface of our busy lives.

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

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.

Deborah Garrison

Chivalry, I don't abuse you,
Not at all — the only rub
Is that those who praise you, use you
Very often as a club.

Alice Duer Miller

I speak to you in one tongue/ but every moment that ever mattered to me/ occurred in another language.

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.

Go sow your wild oats
And reap as you will;
I hoe in one furrow
And heap all my fill.

I laugh, for hope hath happy place with me;
If my bark sinks, 't is to another sea.

William Ellery Channing (poet)

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

In all the good Greek of Plato
I lack my roastbeef and potato.

A better man was Aristotle,
Pulling steady on the bottle.

John Crowe Ransom

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