All Quotes By Tag: Poetry

“Give a poet a pen”

“A pear should come to the table popped with juice,Ripened in warmth and served in warmth. On termsLike these, autumn beguiles the fatalist.”

“E andando nel sole che abbagliasentire con triste meravigliacom’è tutta la vita e il suo travaglioin questo seguitare una muragliache ha in cima cocci aguzzi di bottiglia.”

“Almost none of the poetries I admire stick to their labels, native or adopted ones. Rather, they are vagrant in their identifications. Tramp poets, there you go, a new label for those with unstable allegiances.”

“beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.”

“More or Less Love Poems #11:No babeWe’d neverSwing together butthe syncopationwould be something wild”

“Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house”

“Places We LovePlaces we love exist only through us,Space destroyed is only illusion in the constancy of time,Places we love we can never leave,Places we love together, together, together,And is this room really a room, or an embrace,And what is beneath the window: a street or years?And the window is only the imprint left byThe first rain we understood, returning endlessly,And this wall does not define the room, but perhaps the nightYour son began to move in your sleeping blood,A son like a butterfly of flame in your hall of mirrors,The night you were frightened by your own light,And this door leads into any afternoonWhich outlives it, forever peopledWith your casual movements, as you stepped,Like fire into copper, into my only memory;When you go, space closes over like water behind you,Do not look back: there is nothing outside you,Space is only time visible in a different way,Places we love we can never leave.”

“Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness”

“My Papa’s Waltz:The whiskey on your breathCould make a small boy dizzy;But I hung on like death:Such waltzing was not easy.We romped until the pansSlid from the kitchen shelf;My mother’s countenanceCould not unfrown itself.The hand that held my wristWas battered on one knuckle;At every step you missedMy right ear scraped a buckle.You beat time on my headWith a palm caked hard by dirt,Then waltzed me off to bedStill clinging to your shirt.”

“Poetry is an intimate act. It’s about bringing forth something that’s inside you–whether it is a memory, a philosophical idea, a deep love for another person or for the world, or an apprehension of the spiritual. It’s about making something, in language, which can be transmitted to others–not as information, or polemic, but as irreducible art.”

“Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems”

“The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly.”

“Again I resume the longlesson: how small a thingcan be pleasing, how littlein this hard world it takesto satisfy the mindand bring it to its rest.”

“When there’s a moon the shadows in the house grow larger;invisible hands draw back the curtains,a pallid finger writes forgotten words on dustof the piano…”