Poet Quotes

When I recall that at the fourth hour
of the night, watched by shining stars,
LOVE at last became incarnate,
the memory is horror.

Those two wholesome defects of the French people, malice and curiosity, both of which are essential to its greatness.

I fear freedom. I, above all, fear the freedom that is above all feardom.

Giannina Braschi

Kiss me with rain on your eyelashes, come on, let us sway together, under the trees, and to hell with thunder.

Edwin Morgan (poet)

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'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

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

To rid the grass of weed, to get
The whole root,
Thick, tangled, takes a strong mind

And desire - to make clean, make pure.
The weed, tough
As the rock it leaps against,

Unless plucked to the last
Live fiber
Will plunge up through dark again.

The weed also has the desire
To make clean,
Make pure, there against the rock.

Imagine your shadow burning off the page / As the dear world and the dead word disengage

Only one thing abides: an infinite beauty that passes from form to form, eternally changed and revealed afresh.

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

If I told you about a land of love...would you swallow it as a remedy?

You are made of bent coat hangers, honey, gravel, epoxy and handstands. I am made of lying on the floor, the same song on repeat.

Dean Young (poet)

This wind you hear is the birth of memory
when the moment hatches in time's womb
there will be no art talk, the only poem
you will hear will be the spearpoint pivoted
in the punctured marrow of the villain; the
timeless native son dancing like crazy to
the retrieved rhythms of desire
fading
in-
to
memory.

Keorapetse Kgositsile

When liberty, this austere goddess,
Comes down to console people on earth;
That she finds them seated, in their heavy troubles,
On a ground cracked a thousand and four hundred years ago,
Her work which everywhere encounters a rebellious ground
Is very laborious before emerging beautiful

Auguste-Marseille Barthélemy

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.

I was most incorrigibly devoted to versifying, and all my spouse's wholesome admonitions had no manner of effect on me; in short, I believe this scribbling itch is an incurable disease...

Letitia Pilkington

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

Robert Walser (writer)

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

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

We have, each of us, nothing.
We will give it to each other.

Carolyn Forché

It's horrifying how fast time flies. It's cold. No rain today. A strong wind. Walked around a lot, slept a lot. I've been sleeping 12–14 hours a day. Maybe that's why time is galloping by so fast.

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

You can't drive to the coastline. You can only drive so close to the white chalky cliff and then you have to get out and dive.

Joyelle McSweeney

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.