Prose Poem Quotes & Sayings

The universe on your skin is empty
from all the silence on your tongue.
Forgive yourself. Let your body heal
from all the wounds you did not inflict
on yourself. Drop the sword you carry
on your shoulder for self-defense.
Lower the armor you hold high up
for protection. Those who harmed you
are not going to come back. Those who
have left never intended to return. — Akif Kichloo

They shut me up in Prose - / As when a little Girl / They put me in the Closet - / Because they liked me "still" - — Emily Dickinson

Parting
One is strong, a child now grown
The other weak, a parent aged
-
The strong once feeble
The weak once mighty
-
Time, the infinity
has marked them ... — Muse

It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value. Much prose translates fairly well from one language to another, but we know that poetry does not; we may get a rough idea of the sense of a translated poem but usually everything else is lost, especially that which makes it an object of beauty. The translation makes it into something it was not. — Neil Postman

I ache not from need -
but from my heart's gluttony of you. — Muse

I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets. — Charles De Lint

Sleeping Atlantis

Silent cool waters
dancing upon her skin ~
silent cool water
ushering dreams within... — Muse

Now is History as fast as the mind remembers. — Kirby Wright

A Coy Aversion

...a flutter
too shy
to be seen... — Muse

Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers. — Charles Baudelaire

I was stressed and scared and I had to hurry to be someone, become something, do something. I was running and talking and cursed myself when I wasted my time on things that wouldn't get me anywhere. It was work and it was money and I was never where I was, always somewhere else in my head far, far away. — Charlotte Eriksson

Calico Kitty

My calico kitty
was painted and primed
she could prowl
the night away ~
without spending a dime... — Muse

I've been writing poems since I was in the Navy - to Rosalynn. I found I could say things in poems that I never could in prose. Deeper, more personal things. I could write a poem about my mother that I could never tell my mother. Or feelings about being on a submarine that I would have been too embarrassed to share with fellow submariners. — Jimmy Carter

When a poem says something that could not have been said in any other way, in music, prose, sculpture, movement or paint, then it is poetry. — Sybil Marshall

Flames moved towards him
and dropped within
-
singed and marred
his tender skin ...
(the frightful plight tale) — Muse

When you finish a poem, it clicks shut like the top of a jewel box, but prose is endless. I haven't experienced an awful lot of clicking shut! — Kenneth Koch

The Bane
... where coxswain's dirt
and seaman's shirts
brushed bawdily upon her chest ... — Muse

You were the poem I never knew how to write because no words could describe the wind you cannot see, but feel. — Shannon L. Alder

However, if a poem can be reduced to a prose sentence, there can't be much to it. — James Schuyler

Bring Down The Walls
I will bring down the walls
that surround me today.
I will no longer be kept quiet
Meek enough to drown today ... — Muse

I think my prose - mine and that of others - sometimes slips into a cadence or rhythm that can replicate or come close to the music in a wonderful poem, and then it returns to the sound of prose. — Pattiann Rogers

I make work that is many things at once: poems that are prose, that are pictures, that are poem and picture. Actions that are images using poems that are umbrellas. My best work is both/and, in-between, occupying several dimensions simultaneously.
(from my Poetics Statement in Troubling the Line) — Jay Besemer

A dog, I have always said, is prose; a cat is a poem. — Jean Burden

The River Swish

Deftly maneuvered through
the dark green abyss ~
The wooden raft seemed
in tune with this ~
Canorous rush of the
river swish.... — Muse

Time is not ours and we would not own it. It does not wound us to say so.
from the prose poem INNOCENCE — Jay Woodman

Nothingness
... there in this place
where nothingness takes
but for the glimmer
a steadfast shimmer
all would be consumed ... — Muse

It pleases him how Spell is how the word is made but also, in the hands of the magician, how the world is changed. One letter separates Word from World, and that letter is like the number one, or an 'I', or a shaft of light between almost closed curtains. There is an old letter called a thorn, which jags and tears at the throat as it's uttered. Later he learns that Grammar and Glamour share the same deeper root, which is further magic, and there can be neither magic without that root, nor plant. He's lost in it like Chid in Child, or God reversed into Dog. Somewhere inside him is a colon. A sentence can last for life. — Charles Lambert

Traditionally poetry is written in lines. But the prose poem is the kind of poem that isn't written in lines. It is lyrical prose that uses the tricks of poetry, such as dense imagery. This is a big topic of debate in poetry land. There's no perfect definition. — Campbell McGrath

Without play at many levels of language, from phonemes to logical structures, a poem is merely prose with linebreaks added. — Helen Vendler

I think of poetry as a very inclusive term. Still, it's interesting that people want to make the distinction. I love the magazine Double Room for that reason (contributors have to write about their ideas on the prose poem/flash fiction). — Matthea Harvey

Hasten Little Maiden
...
stop and listen
for pearls of wisdom
stop and listen
as the river glistens ... — Muse

Ancient days of sorrow
ancient days of pain
-
heartaches of the past
slowly began to wane ...
(from gleaning granules) — Muse

Tiny Giggles
Silly giggles of laughter
I store upon a shelf
I give some to other
I save some for myself
I am rich beyond all measure
Though not with worldly wealth
I store up these treasures
For my heart and soulful health. — Muse

It has been a Prosy day for us, but for some people it has been a wonderful day. Someone was rapturously happy in it. Perhaps a great deed has been done somewhere today- a great poem written- or a great man born. And some heart has been broken, Phil. — L.M. Montgomery

Chains
chains that hold me to the ground
chains that keep me solidly bound
chains that tether my heart to you
chains that only one truth ... — Muse

If you have feelings about reading, you feel the rhythm of prose or of a poem like music. It awakens something in your soul and then of course you study, read, you grow up and you begin to understand the message and that is the first step towards understanding life. — Maria Kodama

The Inner Self
... What makes us who we are
should be glorified
personified
and sung unto the stars! — Muse

The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital. — George Steiner

YEN
What happens if you take a cup? Put it to your lips. A cup of desire. Of dazzling colour. Of intoxicating aroma. You can't resist. Drink. And in the bottom of the cup. There is a fish. And the fish says "You have uncovered me! Now I am condemned. To die."
What happens if you find a box? 35mm by 35mm exactly. And are curious. You open it quickly. Of course. And inside there is an eye. And the eye seems to think that the box is its exclusive property. And fixes you with a terrifying glare.
What happens if you catch a soft sound? A voice whispering in the air. Above the tree tops. And you can't quite hear what it is saying. But you have to listen. So you float up. Then you find you can't come down again. When the conversation is finished. — Jay Woodman

Depths of Friendship
... under fathoms deep
of dark and bitter cold
an eerie oscillation
reverberated brash and bold ... — Muse

Edwards's stark presentation of the immanent consciousness of Separation enters the structure of her poems. Each word is a cipher, through its sensible sign another sign hidden. The recipient of a letter, or combination of letter and poem from Emily Dickinson, was forced much like Edwards' listening congregation, through shock and through subtraction of the ordinary, to a new way of perceiving. Subject and object were fused at that moment, into the immediate feeling of understanding. This re-ordering of the forward process of reading is what makes her poetry and the prose of her letters among the most original writing of her century. — Susan Howe

And I'll flip through the newest issue, walking back from my blue mailbox, hunting for the poem he chose over mine, and it'll be the same thing as always. The prose will have pulled back, and the poem will be there, cavorting, saying, I'm a poem, I'm a poem. No, you're not! You're an impostor, you're a toy train of pretend stanzas of chopped garbage. Just like my poem was. — Nicholson Baker

Ode to the Chamber
... linger here amidst the chamber
in which we embrace our love
talk to me of sonnets
and call me turtledove ... — Muse

Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose. — J.K. Rowling

Cradle of Solitude
For we know not why our tribulations
are given as such
our fragile forms
created from the dust ... — Muse

hough we travel the whole over to find the perfect match,we must carry it with us a light or it's playing hard to catch. — Ana Claudia Antunes

The tragedy of love is in its ending,
the blessing - everything else.

No love ever deserves to end. — Akif Kichloo

To summarize a poem or put it into prose is quite simply to misunderstand the essence of an art. — Paul Valery

Do You Believe
Do you believe
that I have loved you
since the dawn of time?
Do you believe
that we were destined
to be intertwined? ... — Muse

Let my life as Poet begin. I want the life of the Poet. I have labored for over twelve years, one thousand pages of prose. Now, I want the easiness of poetry. The brevity of the poem. — Maxine Hong Kingston

I used the word 'prose' in the Trans-Siberian in the early Latin sense of prosa dictu. Poem seemed to me too pretentious, too narrow. Prose is more open, popular. — Blaise Cendrars

To read a poem with no thought in mind but to paraphrase it into a single, simple and usually high-minded prose statement is the destruction of poetry. — John Ciardi

..Breaking yet budding,
dying yet living - standing
amongst ruins and rage,
reaching for possibilities
playing hard to get. — Meraaqi

Lehman uses many conveyances - including the prose poem, the sestina, and curt rhymes - to travel across the writing life of a poet whose instinctive romanticism is always bracing and tough-minded, brimming with a rare generosity. — Ken Tucker

For me, prose is never a poem. Because with prose there are so very few tools to create the music. And one of the most important tools missing is the ability to create silences, as you can in poetry by how you fashion the lines and breaks within the lines and stanzas. — Pattiann Rogers

It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet than a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society.[ ... ]what the poet is saying- that is, what his poem "means" if translated into prose- is relatively unimportant, even to himself. The thought contained in a poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem than the anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement of sounds and associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning altogether. — George Orwell

When I start writing a poem, I can usually know quite early on whether it's a lineated or prose poem, but I don't think I can explain how. It's like deciding whether to wear a skirt or a pair of pants. — Matthea Harvey

Have trembled beneath the pressure of a light beam. — Jay Woodman

What I desire of a poem is a clear understanding of motive, and a just evaluation of feeling A poem in the first place should offer us a new perception..bringing into being a new experience Verse is more valuable than prose for its rhythms are faster and more highly organised and lead to greater compexity. — Yvor Winters

Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds. — Henry David Thoreau

The prose poem Walk The Red Road is great stuff and deserves to be read aloud. It compares quite favorably to The Walls Of Emerald by Li Chiang Yen, a Chinese poet of the late Tang period. — Brian Aldiss

When somebody discusses my work with me and peruses a poem or two, they get to see a piece of who I am. Because when it comes to poetry, I let it all spill forth. Any other way of writing prose would be a disservice to the art of poetry. — Nicholas Trandahl

Read your work aloud, if you can, if you aren't too embarrassed by the sound of your voice ringing out when you are alone in a room. Chances are that the sentence you can hardly pronounce without stumbling is a sentence that needs to be reworked to make it smoother and more fluent. A poet once told me that he was reading a draft of a new poem aloud to himself when a thief broke into his Manhattan loft. Instantly surmising that he had entered the dwelling of a madman, the thief turned and ran without taking anything, and without harming the poet. So it maybe that reading your work aloud will not only improve its quality but save your life in the process. — Francine Prose

One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever. — May Sarton

Poetry is a language for when you can't quite write prose about something, you can't quite say it, but if you do a poem, it kind of gets to the point. — Sakyong Mipham

I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity. — Ben Lerner

I do love the prose poem because it's such a perverse and provocative little box - always asking to be questioned, never giving a straight or definitive answer. — Matthea Harvey

I do not just want you at your best.
I almost do not care
where your Happiness lives,
but please,
let me visit your pain?

Take me to the place
where your sadness goes,
and show me the tragedy
that no one knows. — Meraaqi

From the reader's view, a poem is more demanding than prose. — Mark Strand

Do You Believe
... on this road of life
on this day
I take you
now husband and wife ... — Muse

Soul Sister
Evoking all my inner goodness
with bastions of time
I cradle your heart
sisterly into mine ... — Muse

How often might a man, after he had jumbled a set of letters in a bag, fling them out upon the ground before they would fall into an exact poem, yea, or so much as make a good discourse in prose? And may not a little book be as easily made by chance as this great volume of the world? — John Tillotson

In almost every book I've written, there is a reference to a movie - legendary films, actors and actresses, and forgotten made-for-TV movies. The leaps poems make are not unlike the cuts in a film. The miniature and avant-garde prose poets have perhaps the most obvious ties to film, as a prose poem in its shape is not unlike a movie screen. — Denise Duhamel

From the prose poem "The Universe Thrums on regardless" in my book SPAN.
We are almost nothing in the night. Reduced to warm blobs and the sound of breathing. There is comfort in that. — Jay Woodman

Honor Lost

Ambulant sunshine pierced
the soot covered glass ~
the feeble man wandered by
in this ritual morning pass ... — Muse

Gratitude
... here at home our faith dwindles
political division
causes tensions to kindle -
we should never forget
who stands at the door -
who shields us with armor
and shall forever more ... — Muse

I approach writing a poem in a much different state than when I am writing prose. It's almost as if I were working in a different language when I'm writing poetry. The words - what they are and what they can become - the possibilities of the words are vastly expanded for me when I'm writing a poem. — Pattiann Rogers

If there is anything unique about my writing it is the way that I combine poetry and prose, not just on the level of having a poem here, prose there, but that it really is a true amalgam. — Richard Grossman

Unquestioning automatons
blindly marching to the beat -
an eerie crunching sound
hoards of shuffling feet ...
(from silent moments) — Muse

Lollypop
... the passion contained merely kisses
placed upon lips, neck and cheek
these young lovers of the castle
of which our fairytale speaks ... — Muse

Sometimes I think people think poetry must be filled with flowery language, thesaurus-driven vocabulary or the dreaded "purple prose," which is often prevalent in my genre...But oftentimes the best poetry isn't difficult to understand at all. It's the juxtaposition of the words. The line breaks. The enjambs. The shape of the poem. Or the double meanings the positioning of the words make the reader feel or think or do. — R.B. O'Brien

Solace of Silence
surreal synapses
of a melancholy drone
a dream per chance
she dared not be alone ... — Muse

Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might go out on a limb and say was characteristic of some leftist poets, Beat poets, street poets and populist poets of the 70s and 80s - all of whom I basically view as comrades, I should probably say, to this day) and on the other hand I also wanted my poetics to operate differently than those more right-wing academics - in practice - even if in their poems or statements they proclaim public leftist views or ideas - they remain academic poets, operating in elite university-supported circles, institutionalized and reading before institutional audiences, awarding grants and awards to each other, sitting on each other's grants panels, awards and tenure committees, as Philip Levine admitted in an interview in Don't Ask, 'giving prizes to friends. — Sesshu Foster

If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible. — Hilary Mantel

I'm being explicit about really horrifying experiences in my life, but my hope has always been to be responsible as an artist and to avoid indulging in my misery, or to come off as an exhibitionist. I don't want to make the listener complicit in my vulnerable prose poem of depression, I just want to honor the experience. I'm not the victim here, and I'm not seeking other peoples' sympathy. I don't blame my parents, they did the best they could. — Sufjan Stevens

We all know what good writing is: It's the novel we can't put down, the poem we never forget, the speech that changes the way we look at the world. It's the article that tells us when, where, and how, the essay that clarifies what was hazy before. Good writing is the memo that gets action, the letter that says what a phone call can't. It's the movie that makes us cry, the TV show that makes us laugh, the lyrics to the song we can't stop singing, the advertisement that makes us buy. Good writing can take form in prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction. It can be formal or informal, literary or colloquial. The rules and tools for achieving each are different, but one difficult-to-define quality runs through them all: style. "Effectiveness of assertion" was George Bernard Shaw's definition of style. "Proper words in proper places" was Jonathan Swift's. You — Mitchell Ivers

We speak of memorizing as getting something 'by heart,' which really means 'by head.' But getting a poem or prose passage truly 'by heart' implies getting it by mind and memory and understanding and delight. — John Hollander

To my mind, most prose poems are more prose than poetry. They don't possess most of the qualities of a poem. — Pattiann Rogers

Tender Ember
... Barred and branded
to be forever unloved
I was a tender ember
seeking solace from above ... — Muse

Poetry teaches us things that cannot be learned in prose, such as certain kinds of irony or the importance of the unsaid. The most important element of any poem is the part that is left unsaid. So the poetry frames the experience that lies beyond naming. — Sam Hamill

Prose unfolds in time; and time contains both obstacles and revelations. Prose develops, the way characters and situations do. It requires a flow. A poem is an instant, lightning across the sky. Prose is before the storm, the storm, after the storm. — Molly Peacock

Poetry contains few words but tells much. Its beauty is that by being condensed it is rich in meaning and open to various interpretations. Unlike prose, there is no boundary to poetry. There is nothing concrete or black and white. Poetry is mutable; it is transformative. Poetry is the alchemy of hearts. And what cannot be said in prose can sometimes be only said through poetry. — Salil Jha