Poet Quotes

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

Since the journey is a metaphor - the most ambiguous and seductive of metaphors, we tell ourselves - it can also be born of immobility. There is no need to drag our bodies around so much, all dressed up. It's hot, there are flies, diseases. It is enough to close our eyes, seated on a chair in the shade, to float on the waves of imagination. Isn't that what books are there for?

God of frostbite, God of famine,
beggars, cripples by the yard,
farms with no crops to examine—
that's him, that's your Russian God.

Peter Vyazemsky

Don Carlos was one of those peaceful and indolent men who do not know how to do evil, nor to go to great lengths to do good.

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda

One can fall in love as often as a tree grows leaves. It is perfectly natural but not free of guilt and complications, unless one takes oneself to be a leaf.

Oh, whoever has been himself alone can never find another's loneliness strange.

Robert Walser (writer)

My mother only said: Thank God the scorpion picked on me and spared my children.

Euryalus, is it
the gods who put this fire in our minds,
or is it that each man's relentless longing
becomes a god to him?

Allen Mandelbaum

My poetry has become the way of my giving out what music is within me.

Poems, like dreams, have a visible subject and an invisible one. The invisible one is the one you can't choose, the one that writes itself. Not a message that comes at the end of the poem, more like a pathological condition that deforms every word – a resonance, a manner of speaking, a nervous tic, a pressure. And this invisible subject only shows up when you're speaking the language that you speak when no one is there to correct or applaud you. Remembering that language is the whole skill of writing well.

The chief characteristic of folly is that it mistakes itself for wisdom.

Fray Luis de León

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

Love is the answer, that everyone seeks...Love is the language, that every heart speaks.

Helen Steiner Rice

Such things and deeds as are not written down are covered with darkness, and given over to the sepulchre of oblivion.

It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?-No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink-Here you are again, it says, and so am I.

I loved thee once. I'll love no more,
Thine be the grief, as is the blame;
Thou art not what thou wast before,
What reason I should be the same?

Loaded with note cards for research papers that I was hopelessly behind on, I'd enter the Public Library only to end up wandering around lost, wasting the day.

A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants you to understand things only years later.

J. D. McClatchy

People who didn't live pre-Internet can't grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was.

When in public poetry should take off its clothes and wave to the nearest person in sight; it should be seen in the company of thieves and lovers rather than that of journalists and publishers.

Didn't I seize the fire of ideas and make them leap, tear, fly, sing

The first few glasses of beer were a revelation; they flushed my veins with happiness; they washed away all cares and shyness and worries. I remember thinking to myself, If I could have two pints of beer every afternoon, life would be a great happiness.

George Mackay Brown

The country wears their going like a scar,
Today their relatives save to support and
Send others in planes for the new diaspora.

The Tarot embodies symbolical presentations of universal ideas, behind which lie all the implicits of the human mind, and it is in this sense that they contain secret doctrine, which is the realization by the few of truths embedded in the consciousness of all.

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