Quotes About Poems

What is older than desire? the bare tree asked. Sorrow, said the sky. Sorrow is a river older than desire. — Robert Hass, from "February: Question" in "February Notebooks: The Rains," Summer Snow: New Poems (Ecco, 2020)

There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.

Goodbye is derived from the phrase "God be with you." A blessing is the offering of one heart to another; to another person, to a situation, to life itself. Isn't that what we are here for? To bless the savor of this precious moment even as it slips through our fingers? To allow its sorrow, its joy, its silence or laughter to enter our life stream and add a measure to who we are? This is the spirit of these ten poems, and the hope of this book.

I have written in my life many critical poems, but viewed in retrospect, they were merely a human harmless reflection, and not a true likeness of the real society of today.

I enjoyed learning the poems, but I didn't understand of what use they might possibly be. 'They'll keep you company on the day you have no books to read,' my teacher said.

And so I told him how living in Japan would give him a leisure no mere tourist has, to know the rhythms of the place, a land of tiny poems.

Children are like poems. They're beautiful -- to their creators -- but to others they're just silly and fucking annoying.

You'll be a poorer person all your life if you don't know some of the great stories and great poems.

My poems are naughty, but my life is pure.

Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life.

What we need are poems that interrogate the world of pronouns, open up possibilities of language and life; forms of politics that support and encourage self-affirmation.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

I was born doing reference work in sin, and born confessing it. This is what poems are.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

Rock and roll kind of screwed up my voice poetically. I found myself having this 'Beat' voice in my poems. It was like this self-fulfilled prophecy because everybody was calling me this rock poet, this Beat poet.

Indeed, "theory" is a poor word to choose when seeking to understand the testimony of the Bible. 14 The Old and New Testaments do not present theories at any time. 15 Instead, we find stories, images, metaphors, symbols, sagas, sermons, songs, letters, poems. It would be hard to find writing that is less theoretical.

My poems tend to have rhetorical structures; what I mean by that is they tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There tends to be an opening, as if you were reading the opening chapter of a novel. They sound like I'm initiating something, or I'm making a move.

His novel or book of poems, decent, adequate, arises not from an exercise of style or will, as the poor unfortunate believes, but as the result of an exercise of concealment. There must be many books, many lovely pines, to shield from hungry eyes the book that really matters, the wretched cave of our misfortune, the magic flower of winter!

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.

She should stay here with him, unorphan him with love's unorphaning, live wise and simple in a world monstrous enough for years of whores and death, and poems of whores and death, so monstrous how could one live in it at all? One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.

Poetry is a problem of form and emptiness. Ze moment I put one word onto an empty page, I hef created a problem for myself. Ze poem that emerges is form, trying to find a solution to my problem." He sighed. "In ze end, of course, there are no solutions. Only more problems, but this is a good thing. Without problems, there would be no poems.

Jet gave the blessing from the book of poems she had given her aunt.

My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life.

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of man and in Praise of God, and I'd be a damn fool if they weren't.