Poet Quotes - Page 2

Remember that good poets too can write bad poems! Talent has also a talent to be untalented!

For if it is rash to walk into a lion's den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on top of St. Paul's, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet.

Hemingway is overrated,Twain is even more lost at sea,And all truths point to the mouth of a woman,Where both her whispers and her screams,Are born.Pour another glass, Beer, wine, whiskey,I don't care,So long as its wisdom is sharp,And it tells lies instead of promises.

A poet adds the awe factor to our ordinary perceptions.

I have wished you something None of the others would....

Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.

I am hard to disgust, but a pretentious poet can do it

YOUR WORDS ARE MADE OF THE AIR I BREATHE.

Lovers, Lunatics and poets are made of same stuff.

A poet is someone whose words can grasp & pull the thread of a person's soul & make them unravel with delight.

I’m passing the bar Where you first got in my car I’m not ashamed to admit That it’s you I won’t forget I saved your cigarettes andBad habits I regret But the hours flew by like cloudsWhenever I had you around Parachute loverTake me awayFrom the plane that went crashing And the earth that’s in flamesSaving you is saving me High above the redwood treesBut down below I see shadows And parachute debris We're drifting like children Along for the rideEach time we find love Another parachute arrivesOur madness will burn As bright as the sunAnd I’ll keep finding lovers But you were the one

Don’t be afraid of your struggles, they are making you dangerously strong and wise. They are preparing you for your superpowers. Let them happen, otherwise you’ll stay in the same damn place you’ve always been, and until you know there is so much more awesomeness in the world and within you, you’ll be content in your tiny cocoon, spinning the same circles day in and day out. Your struggles are transforming you.

I don’t want to be remembered for my work. I want to be remembered for my love.

This poem was meant to be unwritten. But I am writing it now and have thereby changed destiny.

You are my reality, fantasy, daydream, fairytale, music, more than the princess in Cinderella; you are much more than a traditional myth.

Don't say it doesn't make sense then tell me you feel your spine curve and chill humps rise all over your skin. That's all the sense it needs to make. That's what it's supposed to do. That's poetry darling; you feel it in your noes, it chills your skin-- poetry speaks to your soul, it burns within.

The most mesmerizing of artists is always like one who was merely drawing in the sand and people came to watch.

If a muscleman like Hukum can write a poem, everyone can.

This is how I recognize an authentic poet: by frequenting him, living a long time in the intimacy of his work, something changes in myself, not so much my inclinations or my tastes as my very blood, as if a subtle disease had been injected to alter its course, its density and nature. To live around a true poet is to feel your blood run thin, to dream a paradise of anemia, and to hear, in your veins, the rustle of tears.

Who is that blond child laughing as he runs after his colored marbles? [my marbles]It's meAnd who is the poet writing this poem?That blond child who laughed as he ran after his colored marbles

She asks me silly questions. Like how much do I love her?I smile and look at the sky for how do I tell her that it is she who gives me my existence...

Tickle my heart with your pen. Write me for all to read. Bind our love inside a book. Make me your poetry.

I once began to ask around what constitutes a good poem. It felt petty, in a sense. A boy would need no help in deciding which girls he thinks are pretty.

Through synergy of intellect, artistry and grace came into existence the blessing of a dancer.

I tossed a stone into the Sea To see what it would do for me And the ripples went out And became ocean waves To return to the Sea inside of me

In our society of fixed texts and printed words, it is the function of the poet to see the life value of the facts round about, and to deify them, as it were, to provide images that relate the everyday to the eternal.

I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his outbursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication. How often have I seen him draw his dark brows together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his brain.

Some minds corrode and grow inactive under the loss of personal liberty; others grow morbid and irritable; but it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginitive in the loneliness of confinement. He banquets upon the honey of his own thoughts, and, like the captive bird, pours forth his soul in melody.

When a dancer performs, melody transforms into a carriage, expressions turn into fuel and spirit experiences a journey to a world where passion attains fulfillment.

Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician. Maybe an artist. I'd dress in black turtlenecks and smoke Gitanes. I'd listen to cool jazz in clubs, getting up to read devastating truths from my notebook, leaning against the microphone, cigarette dangling from my hand.

Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep blank space high up above many white stars. My own consciousness had been disclosed to me, and I was happy. Then I saw far below me a long, curved band of color. As I came closer, I saw that it stretched endlessly in either direction, and I understood that I was seeing all the time of the planet where I had lived. It looked like a woman’s tweed scarf; the longer I studied any one spot, the more dots of color I saw. There was no end to the deepness and variety of dots. At length I started to look for my time, but, although more and more specks of color and deeper and more intricate textures appeared in the fabric, I couldn’t find my time, or any time at all that I recognized as being near my time. I couldn’t make out so much as a pyramid. Yet as I looked at the band of time, all the individual people, I understood with special clarity, were living at that very moment with great emotion, in intricate, detail, in their individual times and places, and they were dying and being replaced by ever more people, one by one, like stitches in which wholly worlds of feeling and energy were wrapped in a never-ending cloth. I remembered suddenly the color and texture of our life as we knew it- these things had been utterly forgotten- and I thought as I searched for it on the limitless band, “that was a good time then, a good time to be living.” And I began to remember our time.tI recalled green fields with carrots growing, one by one, in slender rows. Men and women in bright vests and scarves came and pulled the carrots out of the soil and carried them in baskets to shaded kitchens, where they scrubbed them with yellow brushes under running water. I saw white-faced cattle lowing and wading in creeks. I saw May apples in forests, erupting through leaf-strewn paths. Cells on the root hairs of sycamores split and divided, and apples grew spotted and striped in the fall. Mountains kept their cool caves and squirrels raced home to their nests through sunlight and shade. tI remembered the ocean, and I seemed to be in the ocean myself, swimming over orange crabs that looked like coral, or off the deep Atlantic banks where whitefish school. Or again I saw the tops of poplars, and the whole sky brushed with clouds in pallid streaks, under which wild ducks flew with outstretched necks, and called, one by one, and flew on.tAll these things I saw. Scenes grew in depth and sunlit detail before my eyes, and were replaced by ever more scenes, as I remember the life of my time with increasing feeling.tAt last I saw the earth as a globe in space, and I recalled the ocean’s shape and the form of continents, saying to myself with surprise as I looked at the planet, “yes, that’s how it was then, that part there was called France.” I was filled with the deep affection of nostalgia- and then I opened my eyes.tWe all ought to be able to conjure up sights like these at will, so that we can keep in mind the scope of texture’s motion in time.

Life. This morning the sun made me adore it. It had, behind the dripping pine trees, the oriental brightness, orange and crimson, of a living being, a rose and an apple, in the physical and ideal fusion of a true and daily paradise.

One has to commit a painting,' said Degas,'the way one commits a crime.

The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses

I became an artist because I wanted to be an active participant in the conversation about art.

Sometimes in life confusion tends to arise and only dialogue of dance seems to make sense.

You have that faraway look in your eyes that makes me want to pull you into my dreams, bring you to your knees worshiping me - desperately. You, the nectar and the muse of my poetry.

If spirit is the seed, dance is the water of its evolution.

Poetry isn’t an island, it is the bridge. Poetry isn’t a ship, it is the lifeboat. Poetry isn’t swimming. Poetry is water.

The universe on your skin is emptyfrom all the silence on your tongue.Forgive yourself. Let your body healfrom all the wounds you did not inflicton yourself. Drop the sword you carryon your shoulder for self-defense.Lower the armor you hold high upfor protection. Those who harmed youare not going to come back. Those whohave left never intended to return.

In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except to breathe. My eyes would move, too, following his, but he never noticed. Only once, when he was feeding from the opposite bank about eight feet away did he suddenly rise upright, all alert- and then he immediately resumed foraging. But he never knew I was there.I never knew I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired to electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self-consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, “When you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.

The world you are in –Is the true hell.The journey to Truth itselfIs what quickens the heart to become lighter.The lighter the heart, the purer it is.The purer the heart, the closer to light it becomes.And the heavier the heart,The more chained to this hellIt will remain.

when you're a poetyou can dish out whatever'son your mind and you don't have toapologize for it

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow. Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live. When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

Birds are the eyes of Heaven.

First the mania for confession,then the mania for clarity,issued from you, dark, hypocriticalsentiment! Let them nowcondemn my every passion, let themdrag me through the mud, call me twisted,foul pervert, dilettante, perjurer;you keep me apart, give me life’s assurance:I burn at the stake, play the card of fireand win: I win this small,vast possession, my infinite,miserable pitywhich makes even righteous anger my friend.And I can do this because I’ve endured you too long!

Inscriptions here of various Names I view'd,The greater part by hostile time subdu'd;Yet wide was spread their fame in ages past,And Poets once had promis'd they should last.

Poetry keeps my heart neat, even when incomplete, I find peace.

poems are small moments of enlightenment

Muse’s creations are predominately lyrical often resulting in poetic sonnets and fairytale like art.

Laughing behind my hand, I followed him out to his motorcycle. “I like to think I’m hot enough that I don’t need to flirt well.” “Do you? Fortunately, I agree. In fact, this time when you walk in front of me and think I’m checking out your ass, it’ll be true.” “Cooper, you have such a way with words. A real poet.” “Don’t I know it,” he said, sliding on his bike.

In an age when nations and individuals routinely exchange murder for murder, when the healing grace of authentic spirituality is usurped by the divisive politics of religious organizations, and when broken hearts bleed pain in darkness without the relief of compassion, the voice of an exceptional poet producing exceptional work is not something the world can afford to dismiss.

UNDIVIDEDI am for One world undivided. One world without fear and corruption. One world ruled by Truth and Justice. I am forOne peaceful world for all,Where hate has been overcome by love,And everyone is guided only By their conscience.

Poetry is another name for a person’s telling of the self, existence and what is beyond, and one’s own perceptions.

Another breath, left to translate

A country that denies it, citizens, the opportunity to "civil liberties", better health care, schools, roads, electricity and water. Is a country on a brink of no return.

When a poet settled down to write a poem, could he foresee the lines he would write? Did his head constantly spin with riddles and rhymes and was his only job to put them down? What if he couldn’t get them to make sense, and no one, not even the person he cared for most, could have pleasure in reading it? What would he do?

In Irena’s head the alcohol plays a double role: it frees her fantasy, encourages her boldness, makes her sensual, and at the same time it dims her memory. She makes love wildly, lasciviously, and at the same time the curtain of oblivion wraps her lewdness in an all-concealing darkness. As if a poet were writing his greatest poem with ink that instantly disappears.

I will meet you on the nape of your neck one day, on the surface of intention, word becoming act.We will breathe into each other the high mountain tales, where the snows come from, where the waters begin.”-In the yellow time of pollen

Poetry is alive because it is a medium of vision and experience. It is not necessarily comfortable.It is not necessarily safe.