Quotes About Poem

A poem is about something the way a cat is about the house.

The Orphic Machine is the poem: A severed head with face turned away that sings.

As a reader with next to no knowledge of classical mythology, I approached 'The Aeneid' just as I would a contemporary poem or novel - and, despite my ignorance, I was rewarded with a rich and affecting portrait of, among other things, the memorably doomed love affair between Aeneas and Dido.

Suddenly it seems memory is impossible. Who can say what fills the coffin of the moment? Are we, then, like moths at a candle, glowing longer than life is left in us? I don't know how much longer it is possible to stay in a poem like this one, sifting through the ashes of the future. —Richard Jackson, from "Possibility," Heartwall (University of Massachuetts Press, 2000)

Sometimes, at night, in bed, before I fall asleep, I think about a poem I might write, someday, about my heart, says the heart.

Sometimes, at night, in bed, before I fall asleep, I think about a poem I might write, someday, about my heart, says the heart. — Richard Siken, from "The Language of the Birds," War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015)

In that ancient Genesis poem, this animating energy is called Spirit. And in that poem, Spirit enters and animates forms, which then create new forms.

It may be easiest to see how this dynamics of repetition operates in our poem by working back from the last line to the first.

Russ Vaughn, a member of the fabled 101st Airborne Division who had served in Vietnam, published a widely circulated poem that told how the Swifties had won the "last battle of Vietnam." The poem ended with "To our Brothers, forever, on that long black wall / You've been vindicated now, one and all.

Some mysterious revenge of nature has seen to it that no poem in praise of drink or tobacco (or snuff, if any) can succeed.

All I can give you is nothin except respectonly if you could digest it with no suspect.

The mind is the great poem of winter, the man, Who, to find what will suffice, Destroys romantic tenements Of rose and ice.

Sometimes pus Sometimes a poem. Something always burst out. And always pain.

If the journal is the jumble of raw material—blood, bones, sinews—and a poem is the cell, the impulse, the story is the entire animal.

in the off-season, when even the beach is a poem about loneliness.

To find your own poem to help with making decisions, look for one that mentions choices or roads. We want to reach a field of contemplation, a state of mind near daydream, a mood of thought without the stress of a demanded answer, because when we're there we can hear more parts of ourselves.

And I, could I stand by And see you freeze, Without my right of frost, Death's privilege?

If you think about the truest joy you've ever experienced, my guess is that it came along by accident. Rather than thinking about fear or even happiness, concentrate on something that will help you grow in new and unexpected ways. Befriend a raven, sing to the moon, write a love poem to the bookstore on the corner. At the very least you'll have stretched and opened yourself up and leaned towards the sun.

The Final Poem A forge burns in my heart. I am redder than dawn, Deeper than seaweed, More distant than gulls, More hollow than wells. But I only give birth To seeds and to shells. My tongue becomes tangled in words: I no longer speak white, Nor utter black, Nor whisper gray of a wind-worn cliff, Barely do I glimpse a swallow, A shadow's brief glimmer, Or guess at an iris. Where are the words, The undying fire, The final poem? The source of life?

A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.

The Odyssey is, indeed, one of the greatest of all stories, it is the original romance of the West; but the Iliad, though a magnificent poem, is not much of a story.

The way to praise a poet is to write a poem.

I always acted in high school. Actually, I started in preschool. I was in a play about Jesus. I went to a Catholic school and played an angel and recited some poem about Jesus. It felt so long to me at the time.

Rome was a poem pressed into service as a city.