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.

We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man.

Amanda Gorman
Amanda Gorman
To play pianissimo
is to carry sweet words
to the old woman in the last dark row
who cannot hear anything else,
and to lay them across her lap like a shawl.

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.

If this be all, for which I've listened long,
Oh, spirit of the dew!
You did not sing to Shelley such a song
As Shelley sung to you.

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.

Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys.

And upsidedown in the earth a dead man walks upon my soles when I walk.

Bill Knott (poet)
Bill Knott (poet)
The candid camera is the greatest liar in the photographic family.... It is anarchic, naïve, and superficial.

Lincoln Kirstein
Lincoln Kirstein
All quiet along the Potomac, they say,
Except now and then a stray picket
Is shot as he walks on his beat to and fro,
By a rifleman hid in the thicket.
'Tis nothing—a private or two now and then
Will not count in the news of the battle;
Not an officer lost—only one of the men,
Moaning out, all alone, the death-rattle.
The music was by James Hewitt

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.

In my movie there are no
horses, no heroes
only draftees fleeing
into the pines, some few
who survive, gravely
wounded, lying
burrowed beneath the dead—
silent until the enemy
bayonets what is believed
to be the last of the breathing.

Kevin Young (poet)
Kevin Young (poet)
Infinite is a meaningless word: except – it states / The mind is capable of performing / an endless process of addition.

A million butterflies rose up from South America, All together, and flew in a gold storm toward Spain...

A sound like a sound of thunder rolled,
And the heart of a nation stirred

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.