Quotes & Sayings About Protest Poetry

Change, change, change it all
Fuck the egg, it'll crack
And they point and condemn
Those these and them
Digiting a shower of crap — Kat Clark

Protest poetry
could there be consensus poetry? — William Stafford

Poetry, being supremely useless, by its very existence represents a protest against the so-called 'real world' of busy-ness and moneymaking, so we must embrace, salute and support our poets. — Tom Hodgkinson

Your politics are so far right,
They're wrong. — Harry Whitewolf

They tell me to be quiet
When I'd rather cause a riot
And have everyone screaming
Out their eccentric meaning. — Initially NO

Alas, our fundamental experience is duality: mind and body, freedom and necessity, evil and good, and certainly world and God. It is the same with our protest against pain and death. In the poetry I select I am not seeking an escape from dread but rather proof that dread and reverence can exist within us simultaneously. — Czeslaw Milosz

Writing becomes a form of protest against the incontestable ravages of time. The poet takes revenge on mortality, defeating cruelty and saving what she can by thinking the unthinkable and presiding over her own creation. The joy of writing stands against the bitter knowledge of just how much of the world cannot be controlled outside the work of art. This is the art of poetry trying to kill time. Probably — Edward Hirsch

The maiden Olympics had more to protest about than mere war, though. Central to its ethos was a rejection of two establishments the political one, certainly, but also that of the wider poetry world itself. It changed poetry for ever in the UK, ... It led to readings all over the country. You suddenly got more women reading and publishing poems, as well as gay guys and poets from all over the world. Until that time, published poetry had been very university-based white, male, middle-class. We were trying to break poetry out of its academic confines. — Adrian Mitchell

Oh gods ... oh gods ... I had hurt him ... so many times, I had hurt him. By trying to hurt myself, I had hurt him. By trying to push him away, I had hurt him. Every time I opened my mouth and belittled myself with my "turns of rough poetry", I had sliced his heart as fine as my wrists. I did not know why he loved me as he did. I might never know. But as I stood there and held him, my back nagging at me and my leg screaming in protest, I realized that the least I could do was welcome his love with an open heart. And part of doing that was loving myself enough to want to live. — Amy Lane

I would not for the whole world diminish you. I know it is usual in these circumstances to protest - "I love you for yourself alone" - "I love you essentially" - and as you imply, my dearest, to mean by "you essentially" - lips hands and eyes. But you must know - we do know - that it is not so - dearest, I love your soul and with that your poetry - the grammar and stopping and hurrying syntax of your quick thought - quite as much essentially you as Cleopatra's hopping was essentially hers to delight Antony - more essentially, in that while all lips hands and eyes resemble each other somewhat (though yours are enchanting and also magnetic) - your thought clothed with your words is uniquely you, came with you, would vanish if you vanished - — A.S. Byatt

Silence can be a form of protest. It can be a means of survival. But it can also be a school of poetry - one with its own meter, tropes, and conventions. One that needn't be written with pencils or pens; but that can be written in the soul with a revolver to the chest." With — Amor Towles