Good Poems Quotes & Sayings

In the hours waking,
when we're still all still,
and you can hear the floorboards creaking,
and you can feel the shades blow in,
the night we slept with,
we'll never kiss like that again.
Our lips, will sever,
our memories, will dissipate,
and our shadows will be swallowed by the sky. — Dave Matthes

Sad that there is books that are based on bad events that has happened. But there is books that has been based on really good events. I like to read the ones that are based on both. — Dawn Huntsman

When I tell my family I want to be a writer, they smile and say, We see you in the backyard with your writing. They say, We hear you making up all those stories. And, We used to write poems. And, It's a good hobby, we see how quiet it keeps you. They say, But maybe you should be a teacher, a lawyer, do hair . . . I'll think about it, I say. And maybe all of us know this is just another one of my stories. — Jacqueline Woodson

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him - but he was a good and faithful horse.
-Frank

From "Eulogy for a Percheron" in "The Horse Lawyer and Other Poems — Greg Seeley

Don't start talkin about books or quotin poems at them. these is good folks but they ain't real crazy about readin books. just do what i do and you'll be all right. — William Gay

Fate was not kind, life was capricious and terrible, and there was no good or reason in nature. But there is good and reason in us, in human beings, with whom fortune plays, and we can be stronger than nature and fate, if only for a few hours. And we can draw close to one another in times of need, and live to comfort each other.

And sometimes when the black depths are silent, we can do even more. We can then be gods for moments, stretch out a commanding hand and create things which were not there before and which, when they are created, continue to live without us. Out of sounds, words and other frail and worthless things, we can construct playthings--songs and poems full of meaning, consolation and goodness, more beautiful and enduring than the grim sport of fortune and destiny. — Hermann Hesse

He slowed to a walk. As he approached her he was surprised at just how pretty she was. She looked a little like Maureen O'Hara in those old pirate movies. His writer's mind kicked in and he thought, This woman could break my heart. I could crash and burn on this woman. I could lose this woman, drink heavily, write profound poems, and die in the gutter of turberculosis over this woman.
This was not an unusual reaction for Tommy. He had it often, mostly with girls who worked the drive-through windows at fast-food places. He would drive off with the smell of fries in his car and the bitter taste of unrequited love on his tongue. It was usually good for at least one short story. — Christopher Moore

The wall between writing and painting is just good grammar.

Moderation in moderation.

Fun is scary with a happy ending.

Just love. If love doesn't transform that which annoys you, it will be easier to tolerate. — Emily Thornton Calvo

Girls, be good to these spirits of music and poetry
that breast your threshold with their scented gifts.
Lift the lyre, clear and sweet, they leave with you.
As for me, this body is now so arthritic
I cannot play, hardly even hold the instrument.
Can you believe my white hair was once black?
And oh, the soul grows heavy with the body.
Complaining knee-joints creak at every move.
To think I danced as delicate as a deer!
Some gloomy poems came from these thoughts:
useless: we are all born to lose life,
and what is worse, girls, to lose youth.
The legend of the goddess of the dawn
I'm sure you know: how rosy Eos
madly in love with gorgeous young Tithonus
swept him like booty to her hiding-place
but then forgot he would grow old and grey
while she in despair pursued her immortal way. — Sappho

THE ALIENS
from The Last Night Of The Earth Poems

you may not believe it
but there are people
who go through life with
very little
friction of distress.
they dress well, sleep well.
they are contented with
their family
life.
they are undisturbed
and often feel
very good.
and when they die
it is an easy death, usually in their
sleep.

you may not believe
it
but such people do
exist.

but i am not one of
them.
oh no, I am not one of them,
I am not even near
to being
one of
them.
but they
are there

and I am
here. — Charles Bukowski

To write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers. — Mary Oliver

It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write. — Philip Larkin

God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good. — W. H. Auden

If poetry were nothing but texture, [Dylan] Thomas would be as good as any poet alive. The what of his poems is hardly essential to their success, and the best and most brilliantly written pieces usually say less than the worst. — Randall Jarrell

Re: Robert Montgomery's Poems His writing bears the same relation to poetry which a Turkey carpet bears to a picture. There are colours in the Turkey carpet out of which a picture might be made. There are words in Mr. Montgomery's writing which, when disposed in certain orders and combinations,have made, and will make again, good poetry. But, as they now stand, they seem to be put together on principle in such a manner as to give no image of anything in the heavens above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth. — Thomas B. Macaulay

I belong to clever words and bedtime stories
even a good riddle or two
I belong to the sound of music
and dance to my own rhythm
I belong to the sunlight on a chilly autumn day
when the world awaits a new beginning
I belong by the shore under a star-filled sky
with the ocean caressing my feet
I belong everywhere.
And anyway I please. — M.J. Abraham

Some good, some so-so, and lots plain bad: that's how a book of poems is made, my Friend. — Martial

What good are wings without the courage to fly? — Atticus Poetry

As writers we intend to make a difference, to alter people's lives for the greater good ... this is why we write, to have an impact on society, to put a personal stamp on history ... Art and literature are the legacies we leave to succeeding generations. We'll be forgotten, but our books and essays, our stories and poems can survive us ... — Lee Gutkind

I guess that would have been 1968. I was a freshman in college and I wasn't writing good poems, but I was at least trying to write poems then. — Edward Hirsch

A successful poem says what a poet wants to say, and more, with particular finality. The remarks he makes about his poems are incidental when the poem is good, or embarrassing or absurd when it is bad and he is not permitted to say how the good poem is good, and may never know how the bad poem is bad. It is better to write about other people's poetry. — Randall Jarrell

The poet lives and writes at the frontier between deep internal experience and the revelations of the outer world. There is no going back for the poet once this frontier has been reached; a new territory is visible and what has been said cannot be unsaid. The discipline of poetry is in overhearing yourself say difficult truths from which it is impossible to retreat. Poetry is a break for freedom. In a sense all poems are good; all poems are an emblem of courage and the attempt to say the unsayable; but only a few are able to speak to something universal yet personal and distinct at the same time; to create a door through which others can walk into what previously seemed unobtainable realms, in the passage of a few short lines. — David Whyte

Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life. — Henry Ward Beecher

How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line - how would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined - well, a good poem. — Ashley Hay

As I read my poems aloud, I paid still more attention to sound in my writing. One morning as I revised, I set down a word that I knew was not right, and I heard myself think: But I can say it so that it's right. Immediately, I knew that I had understood one of the hazards of reading aloud. Performance can paper over bad writing, or substitute for the best language. Performance is a problem, and most performance poets or slammers are actors or standup comedians and not poets; we never hear a line break and seldom a new metaphor. There are other problems with the popularity of the poetry reading, but largely the reading has been good for poetry because poets watch their own poems come back to them on the faces of listeners. One addresses not only the Muse but actual people. — Donald Hall

Women are like beautiful flowers. Only when you love them and take good care of them will they fully bloom into the beautiful flowers that they are. — Avijeet Das

The kind of poetry to avoid in the pretty-pretty kind that pleased our grandmothers, the kind that Longfellow and Tennyson, good poets at their best, wrote at their worst. — Clifton Fadiman

Poetry is not a lost art. Poetry is better than ever. Of course you've got the usual gang of idiots (as the Mad magazine staff writers used to call themselves) hiding in the thickets, folks who have gotten pretension and genius all confused, but there are also many brilliant practitioners of the art out there. Check the literary magazines at your local bookstore, if you don't believe me. For every six crappy poems you read, you'll actually find one or two good ones. And that, believe me, is a very acceptable ratio of trash to treasure. The — Stephen King

Old books, yes! They are the true comforters; and principally because they are old and familiar. Many excellent new tales and poems and dramas are added yearly to the catalogues, and and some of these in time will stand beside the great companions under discussion; but only Time (and you and I and all other lovers of good books) will bring about their survival. — Vincent Starrett

I have been so very, very fortunate in my life. I've met or been in contact with several of my childhood heroes. I've interacted with people all over this planet, and even though I couldn't possibly hope to remember all their names, I remember a photograph, a poem, a sound, a joke, kind words of encouragement. All is not lost. — Wayne Gerard Trotman

What does it mean to be a used white wife, a mother, a tragic girl writing poems? Sandra Simonds gets into these messy words and then tears them apart. Sometimes with the words of others. And sometimes with poems made from scratch. They aren't all bad, these words. But they aren't all good either. And that is where Mother was a Tragic Girl gets its power. You will at moments be laughing but then you will also at moments just as much be crying. If Antigone was alive and decided to write some poems about the nuclear family, she would write them like Sandra Simonds. These are tough. — Juliana Spahr

I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems. — Edward Hirsch

2.07 WALK OF LIFE
Life but like a cycle that you be riding,
You will fall if you ever stop peddling,
Life not of good cards you be holding,
But those held and how you be playing.
[68] - 4 — Munindra Misra

The greatest of poems is an inventory.
Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it
in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to
look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy
one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the
solitary island. — G.K. Chesterton

I didn't leave early that morning. I waited for him to wake up and kiss me good morning. He said he was going to take a shower and I should come join him. I thought now was as good of a time as any and placed the ring on his corner table with my note.

It read:
My Love, I don't know how you will accept my decision. I do love you with all my heart but you are not my first love. I am always going to be infatuated with my love for the sea. Accept my proposal after I have completed my education, claim my heart for thy own & obtain thy love in which it possesses.
With all My Love, Zara

-emerald eyes of the sea — Hazel Cartwright

I can explain all the poems that were ever invented - and a good many that haven't been invented just yet. — Lewis Carroll

be good to yourself
you're the only you
you'll ever get — R H Sin

I live alone, perhaps for no good reason, for the reason that I am an impossible creature, set apart by a temperament I have never learned to use as it could be used, thrown off by a word, a glance, a rainy day, or one drink too many. My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there. I go up to Heaven and down to Hell in an hour, and keep alive only by imposing upon myself inexorable routines. I write too many letters and too few poems. — May Sarton

How are his poems?"
"He's not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way. — Charles Bukowski

I can't stand THE DEPRESSED. It's like a job, it's the only thing they work hard at. Oh good my depression is very well today. Oh good today I have another mysterious symptom and I will have another one tomorrow. The DEPRESSED are full of hate and bile and when they are not having panic attacks they are writing poems. What do they want their poems to DO? Their depression is the most VITAL thing about them. Their poems are threats. ALWAYS threats. There is no sensation that is keener or more active than their pain. They give nothing back except their depression. It's just another utility. Like electricity and water and gas and democracy. They could not survive without it. — Deborah Levy

You must be kidding." She says, "Having the power of life and death isn't enough. You
must wonder what other poems are in that book."
Hitting me as fast as a hiccup, me resting my weight on my good foot, just staring at her, I say no.
She says, "Maybe you can live forever."
And I say no.
And she says, "Maybe you can make anyone love you."
No.
And she says, "Maybe you can turn straw into gold."
And I say no and turn on my heel.
"Maybe you could bring about world peace," she says. — Chuck Palahniuk

I write less about alcohol, less and less and less. You 're an addict - so of course you write about the thing you love most. I loved alcohol the most, loved it more than anybody or anything. That's what I wrote about. And it certainly accounted for some great writing. But it accounted for two or three years of good writing - it would never account for 20 years of good writing. I would have turned into Charles Bukowski. He wrote 10,000 poems and 10 of them were great. — Sherman Alexie

I do not remember where I read that there are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die. — Umberto Eco

Oh happy day! A day to make a hay! And when it is mid-day, think about the day! And when you think about the day, don't forget the hay! Oh happy day! A day to make a hay! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Good folk, I have no coin,
To take were to purloin:
I have no copper in my purse,
I have no silver either,
And all my gold is on the furze
That shakes in windy weather
Above the rusy heather. — Christina Rossetti

I work hard to make the poems as good as they can be, and if they're not good enough I scrap them. I find it difficult after a gap of a few years to tinker - I'm more likely to destroy. — Michael Longley

Once considered an art form that called for talent, or at least a craft that called for practice, a poem now needs only sincerity. Everyone, we're assured, is a poet. Writing poetry is good for us. It expresses our inmost feelings, which is wholesome. Reading other people's poems is pointless since those aren't our own inmost feelings. — Barbara Holland

Poetry from the bottom up is an act of selection: you kind of feel your way through the crowds of poems. The good ones came forward a long time ago, and the bad ones fell away. — Eileen Myles

With the need for the self in the time of another / I left my seaport grim and dear / knowing good work could be made / in the state governed by both Hope and Despair. — Roman Payne

With poems one accomplishes so little when one writes them early. One should hold off and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, right at the end, one could perhaps write ten lines that are good. — Rainer Maria Rilke

I've not been a prolific poet, and it always seemed to me to be a bad idea to feel that you had to produce in order to get ... credits. Production of a collection of poems every three years or every five years, or whatever, looks good, on paper. But it might not be good; it might be writing on a kind of automatic pilot. — James Fenton

Daddy-by Nancy B. Brewer
When I used to say, speak up you are as good as they, You would just smile and say, let them have their way. When in my foolish youth, I so often disobeyed,
He would just smile and say, let her have her way. When summer passed and winter overcame. He was not afraid, never once did he say. When in the moonlight his final hour came, He just smiled and said Lord I'll go your way. — Nancy B. Brewer

Good poems ask us to have complex minds and hearts. Even simple-of-surface poems want that. Perhaps those are the ones that want it most of all, since that's where they do their work: in the unspoken complexities, understood off the page. — Jane Hirshfield

Do you know what a poem is, Esther?'
No, what?' I would say.
A piece of dust.'
Then, just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.'
And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick or couldn't sleep. — Sylvia Plath

Do you know who W.H. Auden was, Mr. Iscariot? W.H. Auden was a poet who once said, "God may reduce you on Judgement Day to tears of shame reciting by heart the poems you would have written had your life been good" ... She was my poem, Mr. Iscariot. Her and the kids. But mostly her. You cashed in for silver, Mr. Iscariot. But me? Me ... I threw away gold. That's a fact. That's a natural fact. — Stephen Adly Guirgis

My mother married again after my father's death - another Royal Air Force officer, and a very different kind of man. We went to Australia when I was eight or nine. We lived there for a couple of years, and then came back and lived in North Wales for the whole of my teenage years. I learned how to write poems quite a lot. I just had a good time reading and reading and reading. So that's where I did most of my growing up. — Philip Pullman

Although I've written a few (a very few) poems over the years, I am not a natural poet ... and I remain in awe of people who are. The ability to evoke deep emotion, reveal a new facet of the world, or condense an entire story into the limited space and form of a poem (or likewise, of a good song lyric, or the text for a children's picture book) seems like pure magic to me. — Terri Windling

loved the poems so much that I decided to try writing one. Feels real good to just write out lines about whatever you're feeling. You should try it sometime." "It sounds very good, sir." "I wrote one for Cindy, but she didn't like it much, so I just write for myself now. — Imbolo Mbue

The Mania Speaks


You clumsy bootlegger. Little daffodil.
I watered you with an ocean and you plucked one little vein?
Downed a couple bottles of pills and got yourself carted off to the ER?
I gifted you the will of gunpowder, a matchstick tongue, and all you managed
was a shredded sweater and a police warning?
You should be legend by now.
Girl in an orange jumpsuit, a headline.
I built you from the purest napalm, fed you wine and bourbon.
Preened you in the dark, hammered lullabies into your thin skull.
I painted over the walls, wrote the poems. I shook your goddamn boots.
Now you want out? Think you'll wrestle me out of you with prescriptions?
A good man's good love and some breathing exercises?
You think I can't tame that? I always come home. Always.
Ravenous. Loaded. You know better than anybody:
I'm bigger than God. — Jeanann Verlee

Whereas there are lots of good novels out there; there are a few good movies out there. People have been writing great poems for years, but there aren't a lot of good comics. I like trying to write them. — Neil Gaiman

Always write exactly what you're feeling at the exact moment when writing something like poetry or an emotional novel. Put yourself, pour all emotions into your work ... make yourself cry, feel joy if you are writing joyful things, feel lovey if it calls for it ... just put your heart and soul into all that you do ... then you will be a good writer when you can make whoever reads your work, feel. -Nina Jean Slack — Nina Jean Slack

On the other side of that big-ass mirror, a video camera was watching us. In about ten seconds, it was going to start spitting static at itself, and everything it saw was going to break up into a fuzzy, gray-white wash, rolling up and down, that wouldn't be admissible as evidence on Judge Judy. Those missing frames would last a little less than a quarter of a minute, consolidate themselves back
into a semblance of reality, and then I would theoretically go walking right back out of here.
Between now and that moment, there stretched an infinite ocean of potential
time. Time enough to walk around the world. Time enough to fall in love, get
married on a white beach under purple stars, write a book of poems about
truest passion, have a few good and bloody screaming matches, get divorced in a court of autumn elves and gypsy moths, then set the ink-stained, tear-streaked pages of your text ablaze. — Clinton Boomer

While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels, I liked them. And there was a period when I read many of them. I absorbed the form, and I liked it, it was a good one, mostly the hard-boiled school, you know, Chandler, Hammett, and their heirs. That was the direction that interested me most. — Paul Auster

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun ... there are millions of suns left,
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand ... nor look through the eyes of the dead ... nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself. — Walt Whitman

I think I'm a very good reader of poetry, but obviously, like everybody, I have a set of criteria for reading poems, and I'm not shy about presenting them, so if people ask for my critical response to a poem, I tell them what works and why, and what doesn't work and why. — Diane Wakoski

If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.
Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic. — Walker Percy

There are ancient and modern poems which breathe, in their entirety and in every detail, the divine breath of irony. In such poemsthere lives a real transcendental buffoonery. Their interior is permeated by the mood which surveys everything and rises infinitely above everything limited, even above the poet's own art, virtue, and genius; and their exterior form by the histrionic style of an ordinary good Italian buffo. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices. — Alasdair Gray

Everyone's taste is different. But I think the best way to defend against regrets after opening night is to try your best to tell the story you want to tell. In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts. — Stephen Karam

To write good poems is the secret of brevity. — Dejan Stojanovic

The Ph.D is one of the chosen who know that some things can never be fathomed, no matter how hard you try. What good are explanations? There is no possibility of explaining how such a work [Mozart's Requiem, in the instance] could ever have come into being. (The same holds true for certain poems, which should not be analyzed either.) — Elfriede Jelinek

It's a big thing to call yourself a poet. All I can say is that I have always written poems. I don't think I'm interested in any discussion about whether I'm a good poet, a bad poet or a great poet. But I am sure, I want to write great poems. I think every poet should want that. — Clive James

I admire Ginsberg as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last. — Leslie Fiedler

The goddess smiled. "You are a good hero, Percy Jackson. Not too proud. I like that. But you have much to learn. When Dionysus was made a god, I gave up my throne for him. It was the only way to avoid a civil war among the gods."
"It unbalanced the Council," I remembered. "Suddenly there were seven guys and five girls."
Hestia shrugged. "It was the best solution, not a perfect one. Now I tend the fire. I fade slowly into the background. No one will ever write epic poems about the deeds of Hestia. Most demigods don't even stop to talk to me. But that is no matter. I keep the peace. I yield when necessary. Can you do this? — Rick Riordan

I'm not a woman you bring home to Mother, pick out china patterns with, or Mary forefend, breed. I've seen a chunk of the universe, true, but there's still so much more to see. I doubt I'll ever cure this wanderlust, and I'm content with dedicating my life to failing to sate it ... He's never going to sit at my feet and write me poems, which is good because I hate poetry, except dirty ones that rhyme. — Ann Aguirre

Even when there's not a joke or a hook, the first line has to be good and snapem to attention. Songs ain't novels. You don't have 30 pages to slowly wrap somebody in. They're more like short stories or poems. If the first line hasn't grabbed them, you won't get to the second line. Once you've developed an audience, you may have some luxury and trust, so you don't have to knock 'em over the head with line one. — Dan Bern

He was not such a special person. He loved to read very much, and also to write. He was a poet, and he exhibited me many of his poems. I remember many of them. They were silly, you could say, and about love. He was always in his room writing those things, and never with people. I used to tell him, What good is all that love doing on paper? I said, Let love write on you for a little. But he was so stubborn. Or perhaps he was only timid. — Jonathan Safran Foer

In 1977, I wrote a series of poems about a character, Black Bart, a former cattle rustler-turned-alchemist. A good friend, Claude Purdy, who is a stage director, suggested I turn the poems into a play. — August Wilson

I like ornament at the right time, but I don't want a poem to be made out of decoration ... When I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me how much the presence of the heart-in all its forms-is endlessly available there. To experience ourselves in an important way just knocks me out. It puzzles me why people have given that up for cleverness. Some of them are ingenious, more ingenious than I am, but so many of them aren't any good at being alive. — Jack Gilbert

Good acts are like good poems. One may easily get their drift, but they are not rationally understood. — Albert Einstein

I started out in graduate school to be a fiction writer. I thought I wanted to write short stories. I started writing poems at that point only because a friend of mine dared me to write a poem. And I took the dare because I was convinced that I couldn't write a good poem ... And then it actually wasn't so bad. — Natasha Trethewey

I am increasingly attracted to restricting possibility in the poem by inflicting a form upon yourself. Once you impose some formal pattern on yourself, then the poem is pushing back. I think good poems are often the result of that kind of wrestling with the form. — Billy Collins

How do your poems start out?" "They start as a lump in the throat," she said. "Isn't that normally just a cocktail olive lodged there?" Olivier asked. "Once," Ruth admitted. "Wrote quite a good poem before I coughed it up. — Louise Penny

My favorite subject was English or creative writing. We did poems and making a magazine, and I did one on celebrities. I called it 'Celebrity Life Magazine.' I interviewed my good friend Kaley Cuoco. — Ashley Tisdale

The poem in Where Good Swimmers Drown are love poems. But love poems that defy the divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader. To read Elbe's poems is to discover not only what it means to be in love, but what it means to be alive. — Jesse Lee Kercheval

There's something narcissistic in the phrase "collected poems." Who's collecting them? The poem. How hard is that? That's not a real collection. Now if he had made a collection of water fountains, or of oven mitts, that would be a collection. Or if he'd collected editions of Festus, the long mad poem written somewhere in the nineteenth century by a lost soul named Bailey
that would be an achievement. But collecting your own poems? What's so great about that? And mixing and mingling them in with some new? New and and Collected Poems? Oh, well! Good job. Nice going. — Nicholson Baker

One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise. It's easy to become so mired in our likes or dislikes that we can no longer recall that person who once responded to poems - and to people - without any preconceived notions of what we wanted them to be. — Christian Wiman

Mathematics is very much like poetry ... what makes a good poem
a great poem
is that there is a large amount of thought expressed in very few words. In this sense formulas like
or are poems. — Lipman Bers

There must always be a fringe of the experimental in literature
poems bizarre in form and curious in content, stories that overreach for what has not hitherto been put in story form, criticism that mingles a search for new truth with bravado. We should neither scoff at this trial margin nor take it too seriously. Without it, literature becomes inert and complacent. But the everyday person's reading is not, ought not to be, in the margin. He asks for a less experimental diet, and his choice is sound. If authors and publishers would give him more heed they would do wisely. They are afraid of the swarming populace who clamor for vulgar sensation (and will pay only what it is worth), and they are afraid of petulant literati who insist upon sophisticated sensation (and desire complimentary copies). The stout middle class, as in politics and industry, has far less influence than its good sense and its good taste and its ready purse deserve. — Henry Seidel Canby

But give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost's poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not be confused with escape. And take these poems along for good luck! — Robert Graves

Malthus's school was in the centre of the town of Adrianople, and was not one of those monkish schools where education is miserably limited to the bread and water of the Holy Scriptures. Bread is good and water is good, but the bodily malnutrition that may be observed in prisoners or poor peasants who are reduced to this diet has its counterpart in the spiritual malnutrition of certain clerics. These can recite the genealogy of King David of the Jews as far back as Deucalion's Flood, and behind the Flood to Adam, without a mistake, or can repeat whole chapters of the Epistles of Saint Paul as fluently as if they were poems written in metre; but in all other respects are as ignorant as fish or birds. — Robert Graves

You should be spreading the good word. You should be etching the good word onto the glass scanning beds of library photocopiers. You should be scraping the truth onto old auto parts and throwing them off bridges so that people digging in the mud in a million years will question the world, too. You should be carving eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe soles so that your every trail speaks of thinking and faith and belief. You should be designing molecules that crystallize into poems of devotion. You should be making bar codes that print out truth, not lies. You shouldn't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has the truth stamped on it
a demand for people to reach a finer place!
... Your new life will be tinged with urgency, as though you're digging out the victims of an avalanche. If you're not spending every waking moment of your life living the truth, if you're not plotting every moment to boil the carcass of the old order, then you're wasting your day. — Douglas Coupland

[Robert] Frost says in a piece of homely doggerel that he has hoped wisdom could be not only Attic but Laconic, Boeotian even "at least not systematic"; but how systematically Frostian the worst of his later poems are! His good poems are the best refutation of, the most damning comment on, his bad: his Complete Poems have the air of being able to educate any faithful reader into tearing out a third of the pages, reading a third, and practically wearing out the rest. — Randall Jarrell

For the various spiritual forms of the imagination have a natural affinity with certain sensuous forms of art - and to discern the qualities of each art, to intensify as well its limitations as its powers of expression, is one of the aims that culture sets before us. It is not an increased moral sense, an increased moral supervision that your literature needs. Indeed, one should never talk of a moral or an immoral poem - poems are either well written or badly written, that is all. And, indeed, any element of morals or implied reference to a standard of good or evil in art is often a sign of a certain incompleteness of vision, often a note of discord in the harmony of an imaginative creation; for all good work aims at a purely artistic effect. 'We must be careful,' said Goethe, 'not to be always looking for culture merely in what is obviously moral. Everything that is great promotes civilisation as soon as we are aware of it. — Oscar Wilde

All good poems are victories over something. — Stephen Dunn

Every now and then, I need a little spark of inspiration. It could be from reading (a novel, poetry, story, news article, a blog) or it could be attending an event (play, musical performance, poetry reading, writers conference). Something to wake up the drowsy Artist that lives within. For the past seven months, I have done all of these things and I noticed that my Artist has been up writing articles, a children's story, and most recently, working on new poems. After several years of hibernation, it is good to see my Artist so active. I must continue to give her a jolt to inspire her to do much more. — Sandra Proto

I put my faith in something unknown, beyond the moon, sun, and stars, one day I will own. I put my faith in something, renew. Beyond the rivers, deserts, mountains and valleys.One day it shall become new. I cannot renounce the struggle But yes, it's what this destiny holds The pain is worst. My heart is whole and will not burst.I live on sweet nothing.I am tired of hope, when this dream is not in the scope. I told the pope, he told me to hold on to life and use the rope.I put my faith in you, this is too good to be true. — Henry Johnson Jr

Jane,' she said, climbing down from the chair. 'Remember last year when I built that model wind tower for you and you wrote those poems for me?'
And you said you'd never switch homework assignments with me again.'
For good reason. My teacher had a hard time believing I wrote Tra-la the joy of tulips blooming, Ha-ha the thrill of bumblebees zooming. I'm alive and I dance, I'm alive though death is always looming. When I finally convinced her that I had, she asked me if I needed to talk to the school counselor. — Jeanne Birdsall

Too many poets write poems which are only difficult on the surface, difficult because the dramatic situation is easily misunderstood. It's not difficult to write poems that are misunderstood. A drunk, a three-year-old-they are easily misunderstood. What is difficult is being clear and mysterious at the same time. The dramatic situation needs to be as clear in a poem as it is in a piece of good journalism. The why is part of the mystery, but the who, what, where, and when should all be understood. — Miller Williams

The time of minor poets is coming. Good-by Whitman, Dickinson, Frost. Welcome you whose fame will never reach beyond your closest family, and perhaps one or two good friends gathered after dinner over a jug of fierce red wine ... While the children are falling asleep and complaining about the noise you're making as you rummage through the closets for your old poems, afraid your wife might've thrown them out with last spring's cleaning.
It's snowing, says someone who has peeked into the dark night, and then he, too, turns toward you as you prepare yourself to read, in a manner somewhat theatrical and with a face turning red, the long rambling love poem whose final stanza (unknown to you) is hopelessly missing. — Charles Simic