Quotes by Women Poets

Where did feelings go when they disappeared? Did they leave a chemical trace somewhere in our minds, so that if we could look inside ourselves we would see via the patterns of neurons some of the important things that had happened to us in our lifetimes?

Death stops the body's work, the soul's a journeyman.

Natasha Trethewey

The light died out and left the sky,
We sighed and rose and said good-bye,
We had forgotten — He and I,
That he was dead, that I must die.

Agnes Mary Frances Duclaux

I like people who possess either deep mastery or deep empathy, but not as much as I like those who possess both.

It is so seldom that a young fellow has any inclination for the company of an old man...

But the summits of poetry are mysteries; they are shiftingly veiled, and those who catch the glimpses see different aspects of the transcendental; but they have seen something, and they come down with the glory lingering on them.

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

Little brown boy,
Slim, dark, big-eyed,
Crooning love songs to your banjo
Down at the Lafayette—Gee, boy, I love the way you hold your head,
High sort of and a bit to one side,
Like a prince, a jazz prince.

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

From all the offspring of the earth and heaven love is the most precious.

My mother raises rare blooms
and waters them with tea
her birth waters sang like rivers
my mother is now me.

Summer is delicately made.
While it is, it is ceasing.

Genevieve Taggard

I keep my clocks a little fast / so time won't take me by surprise.

There is only one proper way to wear a beautiful dress: to forget you are wearing it.

Delphine de Girardin

The more a thing is torn,
the more places it can connect.

Meredith Stricker

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

That enchantment that I lightly took
Out of the lovely April is for ever.

I am called "Venus Hottentot."
I left Capetown with a promise
of revenue: half the profits
and my passage home: A boon!
Master's brother proposed the trip;
the magistrate granted me leave
I would return to my family
a duchess, with watered-silk
dresses and money to grow food.

Elizabeth Alexander (poet)

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.

The light would show (if it could harden)
Eternities of kitchen garden

It is hard work to give life to new characters every single day. It is not as if I am God. I am just a tired, middle-aged woman trying to keep going.

Well, but the joy to see my works in print!
Myself too pictur'd in a mezzo-tint!

Mary Jones (poet)

That which we look on with unselfish love
And true humility is surely ours,
Even as a lake looks at the stars above
And makes within itself a heaven of stars.

Mary Gardiner Brainard

War rages on the teeming earth;
The hot and sanguinary fight
Begins with each new creature's birth:
A dreadful war where might is right;
Where still the strongest slay and win,
Where weakness is the only sin.

Various random experiments, cut-ups, fold-ins, juxtapositions, timed writings of other kinds, the "objects assignment" which involves dream, adventure, ancestry. Writing outside, writing on moving vehicles. Looking at paintings in the grand museums of the world in a proscribed way.Little strategies to keep the lalita - play or dance - going. Sometimes it's lonely you know, just you and your own imagination.