Quotes About Poem

The good poem is implicitly philosophical. The not so good poem, conversely, may exquisitely describe a tree or loneliness, but if the description does not suggest an attitude toward nature, or human nature, we are left with a kind of dentist office art — devoted to decoration and the status quo.

Whenever you touch a poem that caresses your soul, breathe it gently for it might be the wind that perfects your life's goal.

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.

Umberto Eco has called his poem 'the apotheosis of the virtual world'.

I can't divorce Kent and his art from what causes pain in Kent's life. This is true in the lives of many individuals labeled ADHD. Their greatest gifts are interwoven with their greatest weaknesses. This might be true for all of us. But we can make something beautiful from this paradox. Our lives can sometimes be a sort of poem—part genetics, part individual adaptation.

Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user's manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.

The monsoon came, six months of infinite rain. The towns I once knew were wiped clean, and everyone said it was God revising his poem.

It was a poem of volume and geometry without humanity—a little bit of Swiss megalomania come to the North. As Bev says, I have views about the International Style.

Our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable to to experience, if not a genuine poem—no such thing—a place for the genuine, whatever that might mean.

Horsfall was fond of practical jokes. He once wired up a toilet seat to a battery and waited for a girlfriend to use it. 'The scream that Kath gave when the magneto was turned on was most satisfying,' he recalled. He even wrote a poem to commemorate the occasion. I gave her time to start her piddle Then gave the thing a violent twiddle Before I could complete a turn She closed the circuit with her stern, And shooting off the wooden seat Emitted a most piercing shriek.

I usually write for the individual reader -though I would like to have many such readers. There are some poets who write for people assembled in big rooms, so they can live through something collectively. I prefer my reader to take my poem and have a one-on-one relationship with it.

There's a lot of rage in my head. I like the friction that means there is nothing relaxing about writing a poem. I can't afford to relax in any area of life. You have to keep your senses awake to all the complacency that kicks in - particularly for the English.

It was an itinerary for an alternate life. If things had gone according to my wife's vision, yesterday she would have hovered near me as I read this poem, watching me expectantly, the hope emanating from her like a fever: *Please get this. Please get me.*

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.

The term 'epitaph' itself means 'something to be spoken at a burial or engraved upon a tomb.' When an epitaph is a poem written for a tomb, and appears in a book, we are aware that we are not reading it in its proper form: we are reading a reproduction. The original of the epitaph is the tomb itself, with its words cut into the stone.

Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.'

Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.

The stereo played an abstract tone poem by a pianist who sounded as if he had OD'd on Nembutal five minutes before the recording session.

My mother is a poem I'll never be able to write, though everything I write is a poem to my mother.

My mother is a poem I'll never be able to write, though everything I write is a poem to my mother.

though I wouldn't have admitted it, even to myself, I didn't want God aboard. He was too heavy. I wanted Him approving from a considerable distance. I didn't want to be thinking of Him. I wanted to be free—like Gypsy. I wanted life itself, the color and fire and loveliness of life. And Christ now and then, like a loved poem I could read when I wanted to. I didn't want us to be swallowed up in God. I wanted holidays from the school of Christ.

The girl with purple hair and I are holding hands now I only wanted an apology. An acknowledgement of what occurred. Grappling as artists, as girls, as ships in bottles, how do we change any of it? I tell her I am going to write a poem. She says no one wants to hear a rape poem, mary

I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple--or a green field--a place to enter, and in which to feel.

But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple—or a green field—a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing—an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness—wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak—to be company.