Poesia Quotes & Sayings

Slowly my body grows a single sound, slowly I become a bell, an oval, disembodied vowel, I grow, an owl, an aureole, white fire
poesia Metamorfosi, I. Luna — Derek Walcott

In rereading one of the best essays I know on Dante's Paradiso, Giovanni Getto's "Aspetti della poesia di Dante" (Aspects of Dante's Poetry, 1947), one can see that there is not one single image of Paradise that does not stem from a tradition that was part of the medieval reader's heritage, I won't say of ideas, but of daily fantasies and feelings. It is from the biblical tradition and the church fathers that these radiances come from, these vortices of flame, these lamps, these suns, these brilliances and brightnesses emerging "like a horizon clearing" (Par. 14.69) ... For medieval man, reading about this light and luminosity was equivalent to when we dream about the sinuous gracefulness of a movie star, the elegant lines of a car ... It is this appeal to a poetry of understanding that can make the Paradiso fascinating even for the modern reader who has lost the reference points familiar to his medieval counterpart. — Umberto Eco

To count the stones losing count
is the sense of our life: the algebra
of our displacements.
To follow paths losing sense
is the circumvolution, the evolution: the logic
of our moments. But. No.
There is no symmetry in our acts.
Never the chance of steps that surprise us
to salt.
Our time machine. Forward.
Never backward the meat machine.
No turning back. No turning back.
There is no remedy: death
is an incurable asymmetry.
Huge is the ticking of the Clock but
but our time has the clutch, the vortex
the saltwater of a wave that covers us.
It reshapes and hollows out the face, like sand
robs us of our flesh. — Piero Olmeda

What will they say about my poetry who never touched my blood? Que diran de mi poesia los que no tocaron mi sangre? — Pablo Neruda