All Quotes By Tag: Poets

“Love doesn’t make you a poet; it makes you poetry.”

“The Throes of Poetry – Hymns formed from groans of acquaintance, its rhythm weaving between tranquility, compassions, and peril – like bare feet stomping on broken glass – bleeds, recoils, then steps again.”

“I never have time to write anymore. And when I do I only write about how I never have time. It’s work and it’s money and I’ve written more lists than songs lately. I stay up all night to do all these things I need to do, be all these things I want to be, playing with shadows in the darkness that shouldn’t be able to exist. Empty bottles and cigarettes while watching the sunrise, why do I complain? I have it all, everything I ever asked for.”

“the next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern.”

“. . . poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry’s social value.”

“. . .criticism is to poetry as air is to a noise: it allows it to be heard; and even if we can’t see it or feel it, it is there, shaping how we hear.”

“I recall that now and I recall everything for what do we have but the past to parent us?”

“The birth of a true poet is neither an insignificant event nor an easy delivery. Complications generally begin long before the fated soul carries its dubious light into whatever womb has been kind enough to volunteer the intricate machinery of its blood and prayers and muscles for a gestation period much longer than nine months or even nine years.”

“A true poet is one who can appreciate the disciplines and structures of any and all styles of poetry.”

“A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret suffrings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music. People corwd around the poet and say to him: “Sing for us soon again;” that is as much to say, “May new sufferings torment your soul.”

“I had never known any man to die while speaking in terza-rima”

“Then you are a poet?’ she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket.’No not at all,’ he waved his hand. ‘I am merely a character in a poem.”

“I suppose I’m saying that defiance is actually part of the lyric job”

“… the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee grinder.”

“Thirsty for being, the poet ceaselessly reaches out to reality, seeking with the indefatigable harpoon of the poem a reality that is always better hidden, more re(g)al. The poem’s power is as an instrument of possession but at the same time, ineffably, it expresses the desire for possession, like a net that fishes by itself, a hook that is also the desire of the fish. To be a poet is to desire and, at the same time, to obtain, in the exact shape of the desire.”