Quotes About Poetry

As the Son rose on Christian civilization, the Blessed Virgin emerged as the mother of poetry as she is the Mother of God in the magnificence of the Magnificat, and St. John, her divinely appointed son, is revealed as the progenitor of Christian metaphysical poetry in the opening lines of his Gospel and in the mystical majesty of his apocalyptic vision.

Up up and quit your books' is not an adjuration commonly thought advisable in universities but there are occasions -- as for instance, when studying Wordsworth when it might be advisable.

In a way, we [poets] are listeners. I go to poetry because I don't have the words." —

Remember the earth whose skin you are: red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth brown earth, we are earth. Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems.

All cultures and peoples turn to poetry during times of celebration, transformation and challenge—those times when ordinary language cannot carry meaning beyond our understanding.

Poetry keeps the door open to awe and ensures that we will find our way through the broken heart field of wars, losses and betrayals to understanding, compassion and gathering together.

My path is made of poetry and music, characterized by rowdiness and sunflowers, and given life by everyone I have met along the way in this process of becoming human. (When I say everyone, I don't mean just us ornery two-legged beings.)

The most powerful poetry is birthed through cracks in history, through what is broken and unseen.

It was impossible to make it through the tragedy Without poetry. What are we without winds becoming words?

Poetry (and other forms of writing) can be useful as a tool for finding the way into or through the dark. Or a device with which to admire the complexity of the stories in which we have become entangled. Sometimes the only way out is by voice, following the music into the impossible.

The traditional ways and rituals of all of Earth's peoples are kept in containers of poetry, song, and story. It is how we know who we are, where we are coming from and who we are becoming.

It was all connected, this poetics of listening, word making, and dancing. There was power to transform, to lighten the heaviness of the burden of being human. That's how I came to understand the power of poetry and music. It was a tool, but more than a tool. Words and music evoked a state of mind that lifted us up when racial and historical despair threatened.

The Poem I Just Wrote The poem I just wrote is not real. And neither is the black horse who is grazing on my belly. And neither are the ghosts of old lovers who smile at me from the jukebox.

When I began to listen to poetry, it's when I began to listen to the stones, and I began to listen to what the clouds had to say, and I began to listen to others. And I think, most importantly for all of us, then you begin to learn to listen to the soul, the soul of yourself in here, which is also the soul of everyone else. —Joy Harjo

Every collection of poetry makes a force field of energy. When creating you give yourself over to it. In the fiercest moments of imagination the artist may not know where they are going, the how and when of it, and it doesn't matter. What matters is the process regenerates and meaning shifts at every turn.

When a despot ineptly sought to turn a country to a totalitarian nightmare, where was poetry? It wasn't sleeping. It kept the poets up at night. We wrote against despair toward beauty, toward a truth that could imprison us for making liars out of the fools deposited in the seats of power, kept there by puppets who kneeled in piles of promissory notes.

Girl-Warrior was lonely For the poetry-talk of the Old Ones. They spoke in metaphor, A way of language that alerted her imagination To the presence of mystery Where there was always a light on in the mica windows Of her soul's house Where knowledge did not depend on words Of faulty human languages.

Breath is our entrance into story making—it is a promise. It is a constant ritual that we all share, and it is essential in poetry.-Joy Harjo

To imagine the spirit of poetry is much like imagining the shape and size of the knowing. It is a kind of resurrection light; it is the tall ancestor spirit who has been with me since the beginning, or a bear or a hummingbird. It is a hundred horses running the land in a soft mist, or it is a woman undressing for her beloved in firelight. It is none of these things. It is more than everything.

You cannot legislate music to lockstep nor can you legislate the spirit of the music to stop at political boundaries- -Or poetry, or art, or anything that is of value or matters in this world, and the next worlds. This is about getting to know each other

I began to understand that poetry did not have to be ... of an English that was always lonesome for its homeland in Europe.

Each collection of poetry makes a force field of energy.

To imagine the spirit of poetry is much like imagining the shape and size of the knowing. It is a kind of resurrection light; it is the tall ancestor spirit who has been with me since the beginning, or a bear or a hummingbird.

I study and read poems and try to put myself in them.