Time Poems Quotes & Sayings

I look forward all day to evening, and then I put an "engaged" on the door and get into my nice red bath robe and furry slippers and pile all the cushions behind me on the couch, and light the brass student lamp at my elbow, and read and read and read. One book isn't enough. I have four going at once. Just now, they're Tennyson's poems and "Vanity Fair" and Kipling's "Plain Tales" and - don't laugh - "Little Women." I find that I am the only girl in college who wasn't brought up on "Little Women." I haven't told anybody though (that would stamp me as queer). I just quietly went and bought it with $1.12 of my last month's allowance; and the next time somebody mentions pickled limes, I'll know what she is talking about! — Jean Webster

Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations. It's like looking too closely and too long into a mirror; soon your features distort, then erupt. You look too closely into your poems, or listen too closely to them as they arrive in whispers, and the features inside you - call it heart, call it mind, call it soul - accelerate out of control. They distort and they erupt, and it is one strange pain. You realize, then, that you can't attempt breaking down too many barriers in too short a time, because there are as many horrors waiting to get in at you as there are parts of yourself pushing to break out, and with the same, or more, fevered determination. — Jim Carroll

The years rolled their brutal course down the hill of time. Still poor, my clothes still smelling of the horse barn, still writing those doubtful poems where too much emotion clashed with too many words. — Paul Engle

Literature has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I can't think back before a time that I didn't love writing and reading. When I was really young, my mother would read poems to me. I loved Edgar Allan Poe - I am sure I didn't understand it, but I loved it. — Alexandra Adornetto

Writing and reading are the only ways to find your voice. It won't magically burst forth in your poems the next time you sit down to write, or the next; but little by little, as you become aware of more choices and begin to make them
consciously and unconsciously
your style will develop. — Dorianne Laux

No map to help us find the tranquil flat lands, clearings calm, fields without mean fences. Rolling down the other side of life our compass is the sureness of ourselves. Time may make us rugged, ragged round the edges, but know and understand that love is still the safest place to land. — Rod McKuen

You never can tell, though, with suicide notes, can you? In the planetary aggregate of all life, there are many more suicide notes than there are suicides. They're like poems in that respect, suicide notes: nearly everyone tries their hand at them some time, with or without the talent. We all write them in our heads. Usually the note is the thing. You complete it, and then resume your time travel. It is the note and not the life that is cancelled out. Or the other way round. Or death. You never can tell, though, can you, with suicide notes. — Martin Amis

So I took up those poems with which they seemed to have taken most trouble and asked them what they meant, in order that I might at the same time learn something from them. I am ashamed to tell you the truth, gentlemen, but I must. Almost all the bystanders might have explained the poems better than their authors could. I soon realized that poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by some inborn talent and by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without any understanding of what they say. — Plato

I think of my poems as personal and public at the same time. You could say they serve as psychological overlays. One fits on top of the other, and hopefully there's an ongoing evolution of clarity. — Yusef Komunyakaa

Overmodulation
By Charlotte M Liebel-Fawls
You're a cavity in my oasis,
You're a porthole in my sea,
You're a stretch of the imagination
every time you look at me.
You're an ocean in my wineglass,
You're a Steinway on the beach,
You're a captivating audience,
an exciting Rembrandt,
A Masterpiece. — Charlotte M. Liebel

My poems are political in the deeper sense of the word. Political means to live in your time, to be a man of your time. — Yehuda Amichai

The Planet On The Table
Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.
Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.
His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.
It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part. — Wallace Stevens

There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They're too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer's less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they're guardians of language. They're no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind. — Stephen Fry

On a very personal level, I have fond memories of spending a lot of time in the Library of Congress working on my collection of poems 'Native Guard.' I was there over a summer doing research in the archives and then writing in the reading room at the Jefferson building. — Natasha Trethewey

Success"

If you want a thing bad enough
To go out and fight for it,
Work day and night for it,
Give up your time and your peace and your sleep for it

If only desire of it
Makes you quite mad enough
Never to tire of it,
Makes you hold all other things tawdry and cheap for it

If life seems all empty and useless without it
And all that you scheme and you dream is about it,

If gladly you'll sweat for it,
Fret for it,
Plan for it,
Lose all your terror of God or man for it,

If you'll simply go after that thing that you want.
With all your capacity,
Strength and sagacity,
Faith, hope and confidence, stern pertinacity,

If neither cold poverty, famished and gaunt,
Nor sickness nor pain
Of body or brain
Can turn you away from the thing that you want,

If dogged and grim you besiege and beset it,
You'll get it! — Berton Braley

Daniel was twenty-three, a year younger than I was, and though he hadn't yet published a book of poems he seemed to have spent his time better, or more imaginatively, or maybe what could be said is that he felt a pressure to go places, meet people, and experience things that, whenever I have encountered it in someone, has always made me envious. — Nicole Krauss

Gabriel Levin's book is a journey through time and through entrenched animosities of the Middle East. What's astonishing and refreshing is his ability to combine the reporter's perspective with a deep knowledge of poetry, including pre-Islamic Arab poems. A brilliant poet is at work here-a poet in the rugged landscape of conflict and pain. — Adam Zagajewski

Distance,
the dissonance insurmountable,
would be not the end,
but a magnet.
When fingertips kiss,
they imprint and cement something,
that cannot be disintegrated.
Time becomes a phantom,
the wind becomes an anchor,
and old dreams- blankets of warmth.
Lull with me, Lady,
there is no greater escape.
Love and war, even when buttered on toast,
still makes for the breakfast of champions. — Dave Matthes

Poems and songs penned as an unstoppable outpouring of the heart take on a life of their own. They transcend the limits of nationality and time as they pass from person to person, from one heart to another. — Daisaku Ikeda

Some time later, she leaned over and kissed me. It felt just like all those songs and poems had promised it would. It felt wonderful. Like being struck by lightning. — Ernest Cline

When I recite poems onstage, I put myself into the very personal struggle and it grants tremendous perspective. At the same time you get another perspective on the poem you're reciting. — David Whyte

Kiss Across Time," she read. Well, that fit with the lyrics and Domhnall words. Domhnall lived through years of threat from enemies., the invasion of his country and the loss of his culture. His stories and epic poems were all full of death, glory, love, battles, dying and more... or would be, if she had ever been able to catch more than a glimpse of him from the corner of her eye, in research terms. — Teal Ceagh

Considering the number of ghastly love poems that had been written and which seemed fairly clearly a waste of everyone's time, Jonathan couldn't help but be surprised that coffee hadn't been thus immortalized. — James P. Blaylock

As the virtual world of electronic communication becomes the world many of us inhabit all the time, in turning to imaginative literature we may not be seeking mere reassurance nor be impelled by mere nostalgia. To enter with heart and mind into the world of the imagination may be to head deliberately and directly toward, or back toward, engagement with the real world. In one of T. S. Eliot's poems a bird sings, "Mankind cannot bear very much reality." I've always thought that bird was mistaken, or was talking only about some people. I find it amazing how much of the real world most of us can endure. Not only endure, but need, desire, crave. Reality is life. Where we suffocate is in the half-life of unreality, untruth, imitation, fakery, the almost-true that is not true. To be human is to live both within and beyond the narrow band of what-happens-now, in the vast regions of the past and the possible, the known and the imagined: our real world, our true Now. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Reading Ngo Tu Lap's poems, terrible nostalgia wells up in me- nostalgia for a lost time and a far-gone country, nostalgia for people I've loved, and for creatures of forests and rivers. I feel gratitude too. War is over. Peace arrives with these beautiful poems. — Maxine Hong Kingston

Sometimes I have a notion that what might improve the situation is to have women take over the occupations of government and trade and to give men their freedom. Let them do what they are best at. While we scrawl interoffice memos and direct national or extranational affairs, men could spend all their time inventing wheels, peering at stars, composing poems, carving statues, exploring continents
discovering, reforming, or crying out in a sacramental wilderness. Efficiency would probably increase, and no one would have to worry so much about the Gaza Strip or an election. — Phyllis McGinley

But it is these four heroes, whom I will discuss from time to time in this book, whose poems, novels, stories, articles, memoirs, and encyclopedias opened my eyes to the soul of the city in which I live. For these four melancholic writers drew their strength from the tensions between the past and the present, or between what Westerners like to call East and West; they are the ones who taught me how to reconcile my love for modern art and western literature with the culture of the city in which I live. — Orhan Pamuk

This morning, on the avenue, my death was walking next to me, under the plane-trees. I came back home, lied on the bed. My death looked tired as much as I was. A few minuts later, I woke up, made a coffee and opened a poems book. Some light came out from the book. I think it was at this moment that my death left the appartment, crossing the door, without noise. It was not her time, and perhaps she was depressed by the beauty of a few words, yes, perhaps the death doesn't support books and prefers the head ache maker television. — Christian Bobin

I am furious at all the letters to answer, when all I want to do is think and write poems ... I long for open time, with no obligations except toward the inner world and what is going on there. — May Sarton

Poems On Time The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth. Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf. — Rabindranath Tagore

Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,
And what is invisible stays that way. — Mark Strand

We will read books together inside the blanket and stay warm. And keep writing poetry in our respective journals. Time will fly but we will still remain inside the blanket forever. — Avijeet Das

In a funny way, poems are suited to modern life. They're short, they're intense. Nobody has time to read a 700-page book. People read magazines, and a poem takes less time than an article. — Caroline Kennedy

I never try to force poems into a collection simply because they were written/published within a certain period of time. They will eventually find their perfect home. — Rigoberto Gonzalez

The architect who combines in his being the powers of vision, of imagination, of intellect, of sympathy with human need and the power to interpret them in a language vernacular and time
is he who shall create poems in stone. — Louis Sullivan

In Eden I "saw" that Adam or Eve probably spoke each word FOR THE FIRST TIME and that seemed wild and seemed to me that that might have brought them to some essence of language. Once I "saw" the city, I knew it was real. once I saw that a poem was a house, i knew it was real and could go back to it or else write a flurry of poems around it, both worked. — Gregory Orr

My theory is that poems are written because of a state of emotional irritation. It may be present for some time before the poet is conscious of what is tormenting him. The emotional irritation springs, probably, from subconscious combinations of partly forgotten thoughts and feelings. Coming together, like electrical currents in a thunder storm, they produce a poem ... the poem is written to free the poet from an emotional burden. — Sara Teasdale

And suddenly, lying in bed, I became aware of every inch of my body and I apologised to it, quietly. I apologised for bring so ungrateful for so long. Then I thanked my arms, hands and fingers for always trying so hard. I thanked my legs and feet for holding me up all the time. I thanked my brain for working so amazingly well and conjuring up thoughts and dreams and sentences and images and crazy poems. And I thanked all my organs for working together and giving me life. It had taken four and a half billion years for me to be here. Right now. In this universe. And in that moment, I felt totally overwhelmed at being alive. There could be nothing but there was everything. I didn't want to waste a single second more worrying about trivialities. Worrying that I'd never match up to an ideal that didn't even exist. Nobody is normal. We are all different. I had to make sure that every moment I had left on this planet counted. — Francesca Martinez

I got the fat poet into a corner and told him he was writing shit and couldn't get away with it

Now it is night and time
for sleep. Everyone is
tired

from garbage-glutting
lifting their snouts
from the trough
long enough
to ease their gut -
I won't urge the point.

Gold-plated poems
to stuff up
their mind's ass

or politics
watered down so as
not to scare the blue bloods
Boo! you well-fed bastards — Kenneth Patchen

I am really colored & really sad sometimes & you hurt me
more than i ever danced outta/ i am ready to die like a lily in the
desert/ & i cdnt let you in on it cuz i didnt know/ here
is what i have/ poems/ big thighs/ lil tits/ &
so much love/ will you take it from me this one time/
please this is for you — Ntozake Shange

My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems. — Salvatore Quasimodo

But, in the end, a kiss is just a kiss; I have no time for love, or seasoned lips. — Phar West Nagle

They've written songs about this feeling, and poems and books and movies. All of them telling us to live each moment like there wouldn't be another one." Caleb's voice was low and thick with emotion. "And then when you are actually in the moment and you see the time slipping away from you, you realize it wasn't just something people said in songs and poems and books. It was something those people had actually felt and been through. And it scares you because you don't want to lose it." "It's — Anonymous

Helen's era was quite different from what most people think of when they hear the words ancient Greece. The Parthenon, the graceful statues, the works of Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, all came nearly a thousand years after Helen's time, during the classical era. In the Bronze Age, no one yet knew how to make brittle iron flexible enough to use for tools and weapons. Art, especially sculpture of the human form, was stiffer and more stylized. Few people could read or write. Instead of signing important papers, you would use a stone seal to leave an impression on clay tablets. The design on the seal would be as unique as a signature. There was a kind of writing in Bronze Age Greece, but it was mostly used to keep track of financial matters, such as royal tax records. Messages, poems, songs, and stories were not written down but were memorized and passed along by word of mouth. — Esther M. Friesner

Artham felt lighter and stronger, and for the first time in nine years, his mind was clear and sure. The words to a hundred of his own poems scrolled across his memory; he saw faces of old friends, battles he had fought, and even the most terrible moments of his life - and yet he remained himself. The wild animal inside that he had struggled so long to kill pulsed with power, but it was no longer his master. He rode the pain like a knight rides a horse. ...
Artham's eyes watered from the wind and from the speed and from the magnificent beauty of the land arrayed below him. Water streaked from the corners of his eyes ... and , in the vicious cold froze into silvery jewels.
He would have to write a poem about this. — Andrew Peterson

A lot of my poems either have historical sequences or other kinds of chronological grids where I'm locating myself in time. I like to feel oriented, and I like to orient the reader at the beginning of a poem. — Billy Collins

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

If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies, those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak, the world's inheritance, ... these are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. Let a thousand surmises shed some light on this story. — Henry David Thoreau

Anna Journey, in her new book of poems, Vulgar Remedies, creates an alchemical self whose shimmering limbic / alembic lyrics distill the mysterious terrors of childhood, the dangerous passions of adults, into her own honey-dusk 'voodun': protective, purified to gold. Poetry is always a time machine: here we are invisible travelers to a bewitched past, a beautifully occluded future. These poems are erotic, vertiginous, revelatory, their dazzling lyric force reflecting profound hermetic life. — Carol Muske-Dukes

(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

love is myself in the mirror.
i will see love every time. — AVA.

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

On a Fine Morning
in Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)
WHENCE comes Solace?
Not from seeing
What is doing, suffering, being,
Not from noting Life's conditions,
Nor from heeding Time's monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream,
And in gazing at the gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem.
This do I this heyday, holding
Shadows but as lights unfolding,
As no specious show this moment
With its iris-hued embowment;
But as nothing other than
Part of a benignant plan;
Proof that earth was made for man. — Thomas Hardy

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

I do think that all of us think in poems. I think of a poem as being deeper than headline news. You know how they talk about breaking news all the time, that -- if too much breaking news, trying to absorb all the breaking news, you start feeling really broken. And you need something that takes you to a place that's a little more timeless, that kind of gives you a place to stand to look out at all these things. Otherwise, you just feel assaulted by all of the tragedy in the world. — Naomi Shihab Nye

Imagination makes us aware of limitless possibilities. How many of us haven't pondered the concept of infinity or imagined the possibility of time travel? In one of her poems, Emily Bronte likens imagination to a constant companion, but I prefer to think of it as a built-in entertainment system. — Alexandra Adornetto

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.

Art takes time -
Monet grew his gardens
before he painted them. — Atticus Poetry

Most Like an Arch This Marriage
Most like an arch - an entrance which upholds
and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace.
Mass made idea, and idea held in place.
A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds.
Most like an arch - two weaknesses that lean
into a strength. Two fallings become firm.
Two joined abeyances become a term
naming the fact that teaches fact to mean.
Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is, what's strong and separate falters. All I do
at piling stone on stone apart from you
is roofless around nothing. Till we kiss
I am no more than upright and unset.
It is by falling in and in we make
the all-bearing point, for one another's sake,
in faultless failing, raised by our own weight. — John Ciardi

Time sped. And the poet through sorrow Became like his suffering kind. Again he toiled over his poems To lighten the grief of his mind ... — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown-out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones out of our minds, come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil. Out of this fertile soil bloom our poems and stories. But this does not come all at once. It takes time. Continue to turn over and over the organic details of your life until some of them fall through the garbage of discursive thoughts to the solid ground of black soil. — Natalie Goldberg

I studied poetry in college and for a year in an MFA program. As time went on, my poems got more and more complicated. What I was really trying to do was tell stories. — Jennifer McMahon

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

And sometimes if I want
To imagine I'm a lamb
(Or a whole flock
Spreading out all over the hillside
So I can be a lot of happy things at the same time),
It's only because I feel what I write at sunset,
Or when a cloud passes its hand over the light
And silence runs over the grass outside.
When I sit and write poems
Or, walking along the roads or pathways,
I write poems on the paper in my thoughts,
I feel a staff in my hand
And see my silhouette
On top of a knoll,
Looking after my flock and seeing my ideas,
Or looking after my ideas and seeing my flock,
With a silly smile like someone who doesn't understand what somebody's saying
But tries to pretend they do. — Alberto Caeiro

Rain's pouring and it's too cold.
All people bored and I even accord
What to do but spell a tale told:
So once upon a time a land in the shore... — Ana Claudia Antunes

My advice to aspiring poets is to find a community of other poets who are willing to read one another's work. And to read widely, in a variety of time periods and cultures, to identify which traits of poems are appealing and which aversive. And what can be stolen. — Lucia Perillo

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you fore defeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems. — Robinson Jeffers

The skies bend, the time stops, the lanes move and the fires dance,
It can mean only one thing that I am with you.
You are enigmatic yet so beautiful that I have lost my sense,
You are as immaculate as the unadulterated morning dew
And your beauty leaves me in a mystified trance.
I do not foresee what you and I will be
But I promise to be with you till the rocks keep meeting the sea. — Faraaz Kazi

I think my very best work came out when I was about 60, not when I was 20. I was publishing all the time when I was in my 20s, and some of those poems I still like. And there were a few after 60, and in my 70s, that I like. But they became fewer and fewer. — Donald Hall

I hope you all find yourselves sleeping with someone you love, maybe not all of the time, but a lot of the time. The touch of a foot in the night is sincere. I hope you like your work, I hope there's mystery and poetry in your life - not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often these patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again. — Eileen Myles

Vedanta is the teaching of the Upanishads, a collection of dialogues, stories, and poems, some of which go back to at least 800 B.C. Sophisticated Hindus do not think of God as a special and separate super-person who rules the world from above, like a monarch. Their God is "underneath" rather than "above" everything, and he (or it) plays the world from inside. One might say that if religion is the opium of the people, the Hindus have the inside dope. What is more, no Hindu can realize that he is God in disguise without seeing at the same time that this is true of everyone and everything else. In the Vedanta philosophy, nothing exists except God. There seem to be other things than God, but only because he is dreaming them up and making them his disguises to play hide-and-seek with himself. — Alan W. Watts

I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems. — Norman Lock

I did a load of medicine cabinets a long time ago and I named them after Sex Pistols songs. I suppose I must be getting old if I'm naming work after Philip Larkin poems. — Damien Hirst

a billion brains may coax undeath
from fancied fact and spaceful time--
no heart can leap, no soul can breathe
but by the sizeless truth of a dream
whose sleep is the sky and the earth and the sea
For love are in you am in i are in we — E. E. Cummings

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.

I don't want my poems to be sentimental, though I do acknowledge that sentiment is probably rather under-reported in a lot of people's feelings a lot of the time. — Andrew Motion

She would make me tell her, too, all about the poems that I meant to compose. And these dreams reminded me that, since I wished, some day, to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. — Marcel Proust

And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and
can be none in the future,
And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn'd to
beautiful results,
And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death,
And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are
compact,
And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each
as profound as any. — Walt Whitman

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

As a university student, I tried hard to write poems in Korean. It was at that time that I foresaw my death and the world's death. I think my poems started at that time. — Kim Hyesoon

There was always an outrageousness to our response to minor events. Flamboyance and exaggeration were the tail feathers, the jaunty plumage that stretched and flared whenever a Wingo found himself eclipsed in the lampshine of a hostile world. As a family, we were instinctive, not thoughtful. We could never outsmart our adversaries but we could always surprise them with the imaginativeness of our reactions. We functioned best as connoisseurs of hazard and endangerment. We were not truly happy unless we were engaged in our own private war with the rest of the world. Even in my sister's poems, one could always feel the tension of approaching risk. Her poems all sounded as though she had composed them of thin ice and falling rock. They possessed movement, weight, dazzle and craft. Her poetry moved through streams of time, wild and rambunctious, like an old man entering the boundary waters of the Savannah River, planning to water-ski forty miles to prove he was still a man. — Pat Conroy

What shall we do at our tea party?" Daddy asked. "Do we sing and read poems like you do at Grammy's?"

"We can just talk. I can tell you about what's been happening at school. You can tell me about your work or what you did when you were a little boy. You know. Things that matter. — Babette Donaldson

If your teachers suggest that your poems are sentimental, that is only half of it. Your poems probably need to be even more sentimental. Don't be less of a flower, but could you be more of a stone at the same time? — Mary Ruefle

The idea of a pseudonym had been flitting around my brain for a long time, along with its cognate, disappearance. In the 1980s, I published some poems under a pen name in a literary magazine to see what it would feel like. It was fun. It was even a little thrilling. — Michael Redhill

Considering the ways in which so many of us waste our time, what would be wrong with a world in which everybody were writing poems? After all, there's a significant service to humanity in spending time doing no harm. While you're writing your poem, there's one less scoundrel in the world. And I'd like a world, wouldn't you, in which people actually took time to think about what they were saying? It would be, I'm certain, a more peaceful, more reasonable place. I don't think there could ever be too many poets. By writing poetry, even those poems that fail and fail miserably, we honor and affirm life. We say 'We loved the earth but could not stay. — Ted Kooser

I wrote poetry from the time I could write. That was the only way I could begin to express who I was but the poems didn't make sense to my teachers. They didn't rhyme. They were about the wind sounds, the planets' motions, never about who I was or how I felt. I didn't think I felt anything. I was this mind more than a body or a heart. My mind photographing the stars, hearing the wind. — Francesca Lia Block

I have poetic failures all the time. Many failed poems. I try not to publish those, though some have slipped into each book, since I can't always tell they're failures until later ... or I don't want to admit that they are. — Matthea Harvey

It's easy to understand why the most beautiful poems about England in the spring were written by poets living in Italy at the time. — Philip Dunne

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

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed.
(I'm flogging a dead horse w/ this one but this is the 1st time I've even seen this quotes feature! I just wanted to post something.) — Rupert Brooke

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

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

It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first. — Jason Newsted

You have everything within you to do great things in this world. Maybe, you are inspired to sing a song, write a book or poems, create art in various forms. Or you may decide to find a cure for disease, end world hunger, prevent abuse, or take a stand politically. The question is how to begin the process of fulfilling your vision. Start where you are and use the resources you have to build from there. Inspiration is what motivates you to achieve your remarkable ideas. Also it takes time and dedication to excel to the next level. — Amaka Imani Nkosazana

The heft of a life in the hands grows both lighter and weightier. Over time, my life has become more saturated with its shape and made-ness, while my poems have become more and more free. The first word of every poem might be "Yes." The next words: "And then." — Jane Hirshfield

I just think that the world of workshops - I've written a poem that is a parody of workshop talk, I've written a poem that is a kind of parody of a garrulous poet at a poetry reading who spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the poem before reading it, I've written a number of satirical poems about other poets. — Billy Collins

He read me another poem, and another one - and he explained the true history of poetry, which is a kind of secret, a magic known only to wise men. Mr. Premier, I won't be saying anything new if I say that the history of the world is the history of a ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor. Each side is eternally trying to hoodwink the other side: and it has been this way since the start of time. The poor win a few battles (the peeing in the potted plants, the kicking of the pet dogs, etc.) but of course the rich have won the war for ten thousand years. That's why, on day, some wise men, out of compassion for the poor, left them signs and symbols in poems, which appear to be about roses and pretty girls and things like that, but when understood correctly spill out secrets that allow the poorest man on earth to conclude the ten-thousand-year-old brain-war on terms favorable to himself. — Aravind Adiga

Once there was a time
when I had jock itch .
It itchedbad. Then it
turned to acne. I chose
Stridex.
'Pig's Valve' - Mariah Carey: The Early Poems — Mariah Carey

So when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs, - a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary kingdom of time: a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such was the virtue of the soul out of which they came), which carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of men. These wings are the beauty of the poet's soul. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

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