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.

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

Carl Lewis
Carl Lewis
Though Duty's face is stern, her path is best: They sweetly sleep who die upon her breast.

For a woman to be a lesbian in a male-supremacist, capitalist, misogynist, racist, homophobic, imperialist culture, such as that of North America, is an act of resistance.

From the landscape: a sense of scale. From the dead: a sense of scale.

Richard Siken
Richard Siken
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.

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

the Revolution aint dead
its tired,
and jest resting.

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!

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

These be
Three silent things:
The falling snow... the hour
Before the dawn... the mouth of one
Just dead.

The spirit of the year, like bacchant crowned, With lighted torch goes careless on his way; And soon bursts into flame the maple's spray, And vines are running fire along the ground.

Edith M. Thomas
Edith M. Thomas
Someone Should Write Me a Love Poem but I'm Stuck Doing It Myself

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
Willard R. Espy
The problem with secret crushes: in the absence of requital the love turns bitter.

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.

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.

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

One can only know as much as one has lived to know, though it is certainly possible to learn a great deal less than this.

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!'

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

William Ellery Channing (poet)
William Ellery Channing (poet)
So much to live for.
Each rope rings
a different bell.

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
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.