Quotes About Poetry

I wonder about all the roads not taken and am moved to quote Frost...but won't. It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.

Is it the sea you hear in me, Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness? --from Elm, written 19 April 1962

The blood jet is poetry, There is no stopping it. --from Kindness, written 1 February 1963

If you pluck out my heart To find what makes it move, You'll halt the clock That syncopates our love.

What do you have in mind after you graduate? What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I'd be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue. I don't really know, I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.

The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars Letting in the light, peephole after peephole--- A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things. --from Insomniac, written April 1961

Bright beads of red are rising through the ink, Hearts-blood bubbles smearing out into the black stream

Beached under the spumy blooms, we lie Sea-sick and fever-dry. --from Withsun, written 14 February 1961

All night your moth-breath Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen. A far sea moves in my ear. --from Morning Song, written 19 February 1961

I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason.

God, I scream for time to let go, to write, to think. But no. I have to exercise my memory in little feats just so I can stay in this damn wonderful place which I love and hate with all my heart. And so the snow slows and swirls, and melts along the edges. The first snow isn't good for much. It makes a few people write poetry, a few wonder if the Christmas shopping is done, a few make reservations at the skiing lodge. It's a sentimental prelude to the real thing. It's picturesque & quaint.

I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. A spark flew off Arnold and shook me, like a chill. I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into a new way of being happy.

Its snaky acids kiss. It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults That kill, that kill, that kill.

I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.

She used every emotional experience as if it were a scrap of material that could be pieced together to make a wonderful dress; she wasted nothing of what she felt, and when in control of those tumultuous feelings she was able to focus and direct her incredible poetic energy to great effect.

If a poem is concentrated, a closed fist, then a novel is relaxed and expansive, an open hand: it has roads, detours, destinations; a heart line, a head line; morals and money come into it. Where the fist excludes and stuns, the open hand can touch and encompass a great deal in its travels.

And now you try Your handful of notes; The clear vowels rise like balloons.

She. Silent, fawn-eyed. Clever.

have so many merry little pots bubbling away in the fire of my enthusiasm: Myron, future trips, modern poetry, Yeats, Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, villanelles, maybe Mlle, maybe The New Yorker or The Atlantic (poems sent out make blind hope spring eternal—even if rejections are immanent), spring: biking, breathing, sunning, tanning. All so lovely and potential.

You defy questions; You defy other godhood. I walk dry on your kingdom's border, Exiled to no good.

The poet made eating salad with your fingers seem to be the only natural and sensible thing to do.

The balled Pulp of your heart Confronts its small Mill of silence

Poetry, I feel, is a tyrannical discipline, you've got to go so far, so fast, in such a small space that you've just got to turn away all the peripherals.

There are a few times when the songs that are written, the poems that are written, the plays that are written, come alive. By accident you fall onto a stage-set put aside for a tragedy for the lesser gods, and you utter words that were in the script written in the leaves and in the grass for some heroic cast.