Prose Poems Quotes & Sayings

there is something magical and addicting about going somewhere, being alone, and finding yourself in parts of the world you never knew existed, finding parts of yourself you never knew you would find. — AVA.

My poems and prose are not often in direct conversation with each other, but there's so much crossover - everything that comes out of that crucible of language - that working in poetry and prose is energizing - to me as a writer and to the work itself. — Alex Lemon

Known for his prose as for his poetry. The subsequent fame of his verse is due in part to the many composers who set poems, especially those in the Book of Songs, to music. Hence his early, lyrical verse became known at the expense of his later, predominantly satirical verse, and his verse has in turn overshadowed his prose. Yet Heine's prose is as rich in humour, satire, wit, lyricism, and — Heinrich Heine

every choice i have ever made after you existed
has been dependent on exactly
how close i can have you next to me
and how long i can get you to stay. — AVA.

hold company with yourself so sacred
that even when you are alone,
you are whole. — AVA.

you came in slowly like the fog
and consumed me. — AVA.

If you believe it, it is. — Adele Kenny

I don't see much difference between prose poems and flash fiction (I've often taught the latter as the former), but then I also don't see that much difference between art and poetry. — Matthea Harvey

Read a lot - poems, prose, stories, newspapers, anything. Read books and poems that you think you will like and some that you think might not be for you. You might be surprised. — Michael Morpurgo

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

some people are so deep
you fall into them
and you never stop falling. — AVA.

The genius of love and the genius of hunger, those twin brothers, are the two moving forces behind all living things. All living things set themselves in motion to feed and to reproduce. Love and hunger share the same purpose. Life must never cease; life must be sustained and must create. Turgenev, Little poems in prose, XXIII — Anonymous

... and now and then we could look up and give each other a thought,
because I think he could have beautiful thoughts,
and we could just let each other be less lonely in our loneliness. — Charlotte Eriksson

i wanted to destroy you.

you are mine to ruin.
something so beautiful
should only exist for me. — AVA.

I am interested in the confines of the page and busting through/off the page as well. A writer must let go of the line when writing prose poems, which brings its own pleasures. — Denise Duhamel

you wanted it all to make sense
and you wanted the most complicated answer,
but the answer is simple.
just be. — AVA.

let me tell you i'm in love with you. let me tell you that the first thing i do when i wake is think of you. let me be completely honest about this-- about what you mean to me.
let me take it there without ruining everything. — AVA.

The healing power of art is not a rhetorical fantasy. Fighting to keep language, language became my sanity and my strength. It still is, and I know of no pain that art cannot assuage. For some, music, for some, pictures, for me, primarily, poetry, whether found in poems or in prose, cuts through noise and hurt, opens the wound to clean it, and then gradually teaches it to heal itself. Wounds need to be taught to heal themselves. — Jeanette Winterson

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

The Complete Work is essentially dramatic, thought it takes different forms - prose passages in this first volume, poems and philosophies in other volumes. It's the product of the temperament I've been blessed or cursed with - I'm not sure which. All I know is that the author of these lines (I'm not sure if also of these books) has never had just one personality, and has never thought or felt except dramatically - that is, through invented persons, or personalities, who are more capable than he of feeling what's to be felt. — Fernando Pessoa

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them. — Paul Auster

I would rather write poems than prose, any day, any place. Yet each has its own force. — Mary Oliver

If you were going to make sculptures of them, the swivel poems would be disparate objects all attached with hinges and the prose poems would be small sheep wrapped in extra wool. — Matthea Harvey

Throughout his career, W.G. Sebald wrote poems that were strikingly similar to his prose. His tone, in both genres, was always understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur. — Teju Cole

I started writing poems, and when I first tried prose, I wrote bad articles and essays and columns, and I didn't have a handle on it. I didn't go to a school that really taught you how to write that stuff. — Eileen Myles

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

To write? Because all this is ging to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left we nothing, we would be naked on earth. — James Slater

New poems no longer come to me with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures. I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is, on the whole, preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two. — Donald Hall

you have outgrown this skin.
stop trying to hold it in.
stop trying to hold it together.

let yourself break. — AVA.

There IS a difference between poetry and prose! Poems should be sonically charged and new to the ear. — Cate Marvin

It all depends on what I'm working on and if there is a deadline involved. Anything that's headed toward a magazine or newspaper is hacked out on the computer; that's a matter of efficiency. I write longer pieces of prose on a typewriter because the act of retyping it for the computer is a useful tactic for revision. Poems tend to be written longhand. — Kevin Keck

i know it all ends the same,
but i was interested in seeing
how you would break my heart. — AVA.

(W)hy is poetry wholly an elderly taste? When I was twenty I could not for the life of me read Shakespeare for pleasure; now it lights me as I walk to think I have two acts of King John tonight, and shall next read Richard the Second. It is poetry that I want now -- long poems. I want the concentration and the romance, and the words all glued together, fused, glowing; having no time to waste any more on prose. When I was twenty I liked Eighteenth Century prose; now it's poetry I want, so I repeat like a tipsy sailor in the front of a public house. — Virginia Woolf

everything i know about love
is that it hurts
and is almost always never returned
the way you want it to.

but i have hope
because i do not know everything. — AVA.

let your love cover me like skin.
i want the whole world to see. — AVA.

i sometimes think i'm too in love with alone.
who could i love more than this peace? — AVA.

I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry. — Story Musgrave

they say people only hear what they want to hear,
but i don't know if that is always true, i've been wanting to hear your heart and it's as silent as the moon. — AVA.

A child's pleasure in listening to stories lies partly in waiting for things he expects to be repeated: situations, phrases, formulas. Just as in poems and songs the rhymes help to create the rhythm, so in prose narrative there are events that rhyme. — Italo Calvino

you need to be careful with me.

i fall in love
and i fall in love forever. — AVA.

i act harder than i am.
i am softer than i look. — AVA.

Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this student-oriented part of the job. Rather, it was _books_ that no longer interested me, drama and fiction in particular. It was as though a priest, in midcareer, had come to doubt the reality of transubstantiation. I could still engage with poems and expository prose, but most fiction seemed the product of extremities I no longer wished to visit. So many years of Zen training had reiterated, 'Don't get lost in the drama of life,' and here I had to stand around in a classroom defending Oedipus. — Mary Rose O'Reilley

oh, the heartbreakingly beautiful
tender weight of being human. — AVA.

the opening,
the breaking,
the falling apart
is always so quick.

the hurting,
the healing,
the putting back together
is always too long. — AVA.

i am learning that when love wants to stay it will stay.
i am learning that when love wants to go it will go. — AVA.

everyone is in a hurry and things are always disappearing, and i am always left standing here--
alone, waiting for the things that stay. — AVA.

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

The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose. — Edvard Munch

it is hard not to count the hours
i have left with you.

it is hard to be here now--
knowing everything between us
will come to an end. — AVA.

i am awake and alive
and swollen and heavy
with love. — AVA.

you'd take one look at me and whole pieces of the earth would break off and fall away finally leaving me alone with you. — AVA.

you're going to love your way out of this.
out of the hurt.
out of the pain.

you're going to love your way out of it
and be free. — AVA.

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

i'm so hooked
on how your mind works,
on what you notice,
on everything that excites you.
i'm so caught up in
how you see the world,
how you see everything
and still offer up your love
for all to take it.

you give me a glimpse of your heart
and i can't tell you
how much you turn me on. — AVA.

i feel everything.
i do not know how to un-feel
and to not feel
is to stop the sun. — AVA.

I'd rather call prose poems something else, for clarity - something like "poetic prose," prose that contains a quality of poetry, but not poems. — Pattiann Rogers

All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children. — Paul Auster

Prose Poems from my book SPAN
OBSERVATION
So, we may not be able to explain the world. Not exactly. But we can accept it, and love it. We can turn our faces to the light and examine the minutest details simply for the sake of it. We can live lives of joy and purpose. We are all part of one whole. Take comfort in this. Almost every one of us is capable of holding a cup to another's lips without our hands shaking. — Jay Woodman

i can't hold onto love.
i'm not gentle enough.

i always end up
crushing the thing
in between my fingertips. — AVA.

I primarily use poetry as a purge, a self-medication device when I'm in the depths of loneliness, anxiety or in the throes of depression. When I'm lost in the darkness of mental illness, I spill forth a deluge of words and prose that are oftentimes grim, dark and depressive. And when my poems are spilled forth into one of my poetry journals, I feel a weight has been indeed been lifted from me, and my mind can rest just a bit easier. — Nicholas Trandahl

i took it off.
i did not want to carry it with me anymore. — AVA.

and sadness clung to me
because she did not know
how to be alone. — AVA.

through the rose glass window in their beautiful new home, you stare at the love you gave away. — AVA.

show me all the parts of you
that you do not love
so i know where to begin. — AVA.

the hope is small
but it is everything. — AVA.

i am changing
and i am loving change. — AVA.

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

I've always felt that poetry was particularly erotic, more than prose was ... I say that you read poems not with your eyes and not with your ears, but with your mouth. You taste it. — Donald Hall

there's always been a little sadness inside my happiness.

i've never been able to separate the two. — AVA.

It ... whatever 'it' is, has swallowed me and I lie here in the pit of its cold dark stomach being eaten alive by its bile and I ... I don't even know if I want to be saved. — Kellie Elmore

As if channeling Robbe-Grillet, who strove to establish 'new relations between man and the world,' Sesshu Foster's electrifying prose poems tenderly examine then fiercely weave stark-and-broken realities into luminous dream-like narratives on the game of life. — Wanda Coleman

I have been in recent years the author of a bestiary and director of some atlas projects; I've written criticism, editorials, reports from a few front lines, letters, a great many political essays ... , more personal stuff, essays for artists' books, and more ... Nonfiction is the whole realm from investigative journalism to prose poems, from manifestos to love letters, from dictionaries to packing lists. — Rebecca Solnit

i took a night drive.
i needed to get away.
i needed to know
it's okay to go
and have no destination,
where time moves slow
or doesn't exist.
that life can be like this,
aimless wandering,
just breathing,
living,
driving forever underneath the stars. — AVA.

i swallowed the syllables of your name
and i was full. — AVA.

Neither poems nor prose just a length of rope just the wet earth
that's the way home. neither vodka nor bread just bursts of rage just more new graves
that's youth and that's love. neither sleep nor waking neither joy nor laughter just tears in the night
so the rope, paper, knife. — Tadeusz Borowski

After all, poets shouldn't be their own interpreters and shouldn't carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

i am not a jealous person,
but when i am with you,
the thought of someone else
pulling your attention away from me
kills me a little inside
each time. — AVA.

Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own. — James W. Sire

It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you're forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else. — Robert Harris

When the glory night envelop the moon that would light up the exhilaration of heart..
the sun was reluctant to reveal smile to warm the earth..
when the fire burn until the wood becomes charcoal yield and melted into disappointment..
the earth will always embrace the rest of the wood by the fire burning in her arms..
then it's me and you in equation narrative prose deep and glorious.. — Rinto Yusnianto

i just want to be honest about my feelings without destroying everything. — AVA.

I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems. — Matthea Harvey

there is a difference between
loneliness and solitude,
one will empty you and
one will fill you.

you have the power to choose. — AVA.

i open for you like a flower.
i let you in like a new day. — AVA.

i am like the moon--
sometimes, full.
sometimes, black.

sometimes,
forever and ever alone. — AVA.

Peter Conners stunning prose poems are packed with keen sensitivity, dreaminess, and wit. I love his time travels, the vibrant layering of image and detail. Try taking walks as you are reading this book- the dazzle of landscapes, inner and outer, feel replenished and rich. This is language and vision I want to come home to again and again. — Naomi Shihab Nye

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

you giver of light.
you lover of love.

you beautiful
beautiful
human being
you. — AVA.

THE OWLS
by: Charles Baudelaire
UNDER the overhanging yews,
The dark owls sit in solemn state,
Like stranger gods; by twos and twos
Their red eyes gleam. They meditate.
Motionless thus they sit and dream
Until that melancholy hour
When, with the sun's last fading gleam,
The nightly shades assume their power.
From their still attitude the wise
Will learn with terror to despise
All tumult, movement, and unrest;
For he who follows every shade,
Carries the memory in his breast,
Of each unhappy journey made.
'The Owls' is reprinted from The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire. Ed. James Huneker. New York: Brentano's, 1919. — Charles Baudelaire

Poetry is so close to music, not just in cadence and sound but in silences. That's why, to me, I can't talk about prose poems. I can talk about poetic prose. — Pattiann Rogers

Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory or defeat. Everything moves towards the end, when the outcome will be known.
Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out. — John Berger

'Swan,' by Mary Oliver. Poems and prose. Reading from this book is as if visiting a very wise friend. There is wisdom and welcoming kindness on every page. — Jessye Norman

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

You hid in my ink and guided my hand. You stained the pages with your silence as God wrote the words, "Be still." Yet, my heart's blindness could only write in loud hues of red, "I love you. — Shannon L. Alder

do not let anyone in
until they love you so fiercely,
you have no defense against their love. — AVA.

stay curious and stay the brave, strong, unrelenting soldier of love that you are. — AVA.

Whitman's poems present no trace of rhyme, save in a couple or so of chance instances. Parts of them, indeed, may be regarded as a warp of prose amid the weft of poetry, — Walt Whitman

i want so much to touch you
where my hands cannot. — AVA.

And I laugh and I spin and dance and frolic in ecstasy and I ... I hurt no more, while you ... you petrified little man, are left to wonder if it's you I speak of. — Kellie Elmore

remember you are capable of the most powerful thing in the universe.

you are capable of love. — AVA.