Poet Quotes
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Black Poets should live--not leap
From steel bridges, like the white boys do.
Etheridge Knight
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My love is a thousand French poets puking black blood on your Cure CD collection.
Henry Rollins
Black Flag
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Truth is far and flat, and fancy is fiery; and truth is cold, and people feel the cold, and they may wrap themselves against it in fancies that are fiery, but they should not call them facts; and, generally, poets do not; they are shrewd, they feel the cold, too, but they know a hawk from a handsaw, a fact from a fancy, as none knows better.
Stevie Smith
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Every true poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum ) and can never recur. That nothing shd. be old or borrowed however cannot be.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
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a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.
Vladimir Nabokov
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He was a poet -oh all men are when they're in love.
Eric Gamalinda
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Happy indeed the poet of whom, like Orpheus, nothing is known but an immortal name! Happy next, perhaps, the poet of whom, like Homer, nothing is known but the immortal works. The more the merely human part of the poet remains a mystery, the more willing is the reverence given to his divine mission.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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A mighty good sausage stuffer was spoiled when the man became a poet.
Eugene Field
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I got a head full of headaches, a heart that's full of woes.
I'm constantly singin' them down home blues, and not many people knows
That leaves me with a twisted view of the whole wide world as I know it...
And I guess I got no choice but to be a poet.
Aceyalone
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Because poets feel what we're afraid to feel, venture where we're reluctant to go, we learn from their journeys without taking the same dramatic risks.
Diane Ackerman
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A writer is not different from a reader, in that the common ragbag of orthodoxies and assumptions is what a poet has to work with as well.
Seamus Heaney
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A poet or prose narrator usually looks back on what he has achieved against a backdrop of the years that have passed, generally finding that some of these achievements are acceptable, while others are less so.
Eyvind Johnson
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If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless.
Bruce Sterling
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I was strong and tough enough and charming. / How else is a fat Jew lesbian poet gonna get by? / Listening to the radio, staying home, staying alone, like / they mean us to. / Who means you to be left out? / Who don't?
Elana Dykewomon
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Poets can tell the truth as they see it. It’s the author’s story, the author’s voice.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr.
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It is the black poet who bridges the gap in tradition, who modifies tradition when experience demands it, who translates experience into meaning and meaning into belief.
Henry Louis Gates
