Quotes About Poetry

And I'll flip through the newest issue, walking back from my blue mailbox, hunting for the poem he chose over mine, and it'll be the same thing as always. The prose will have pulled back, and the poem will be there, cavorting, saying, I'm a poem, I'm a poem. No, you're not! You're an impostor, you're a toy train of pretend stanzas of chopped garbage. Just like my poem was.

Isn't crying a good thing? Why would we want to give pills to people so they don't weep? When you read a great line in a poem, what's the first thing you do? You can't help it. Crying is a good thing.

Ava was obviously observant, an enthusiast of spring: she'd seen the white frog and the two baby flies killed by the bus driver. And she was a better reader and speller than the others. I told her she could get a book to read, but she didn't want to do that, either. Instead, she got out her poetry notebook. Poor thing: she was already fed up with being asked to do inane worksheets and she was only in kindergarten. Twelve more years to go.

we fill the nothing with suns, line them up, swallow sap, swallow field, drop by drop, each stem a pump. Rose to rose to rose to rose to rose to rose to rose, calyx & anther, all summer gone.

Maybe the silence you move through shaped me, the way a church bell ringing resonates long after the ear ceases to perceive it, the way waves space themselves until they stop. — Nick Flynn, from "Man Dancing with a Paper Cup," Some Ether: Poems . (Graywolf Press June 2, 2015)

Is it wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.

contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.

Songwriting is an art distinct from poetry.

A beautiful woman combining the prospect of happiness and nakedness in the same spoken sentence could achieve the power of the greatest lyric poetry.

Is it so wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.

He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood.

Why is it, he asked, that wherever a Chilean goes in the world, Neruda and his fucking seashells has already been there and set up a monopoly? He held my gaze waiting for me to counter him, and as he did I got the feeling that where he came from it was commonplace to talk as we were talking, an even to argue about poetry to the point of violence, and for a moment I felt brushed by loneliness.

Poets should be ashamed To die Before they kiss The sun

The South lost ... and that is good ... and that hateful flag needs to come down ... and reparations need to be offered and if none of that can happen ... well ... let there be poetry

poetry is motion graceful as a fawn gentle as a teardrop strong like the eye finding peace in a crowded room

Poems are not advertisements braying For the good life They have serious work to do Birthing people burying people Celebrating joy mourning loss

We need poetry . . . We deserve poetry We owe it to ourselves to re-create ourselves and find a different if not better way to live

Poems have serious business to do They need to bring down presidents who Start wars they themselves wouldn't go to

By means of poetry all this suffering and effort could be transformed into dream; no matter how much of the ephemeral existed, poetry could immortalize it by turning it into song. Only two or three primitive passions had governed me until this time: fear, the struggle to conquer fear, and the yearning for freedom. But now two new passions were kindled inside me: beauty and the thirst for learning.

O brain, be flowers that nightingales may come to sing!

Witches, he thought. Always rhyming.

I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers; Of April, May, of June, and July flowers. I sing of Maypoles, Hock-carts, wassails, wakes, Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes. —ROBERT HERRICK

She looks like something poets write about, right down to the sad eyes.

How far away the stars seem, and how far is our first kiss, and, ah, how old is my heart. —WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS