Poems Quotes
-
I tried hard to imagine my poems or any poems as machines that could make things happen, changing the government, or the economy or even their language, the body or its sensorium, but I could not imagine this, could not even imagine imagining it. And yet when I imagined the total victory of those other things over poetry, when I imagined, with a sinking feeling, a world without even the terrible excuses for poems that kept faith with the virtual possibilities of the medium, without the sort of absurd ritual I'd participated in that evening then I intuited an inestimable loss, a loss not of artworks but of art, and therefore infinite, the total triumph of the actual, and I realized that, in such a world, I would swallow a bottle of white pills.
Ben Lerner
-
Each man has his own batch of poems.
Saul Bellow
-
You can't just be reactive to the things going on in your life. You have to imagine, and you have to plunder other people's work, books, poems, ideas, observations.
David Gray
-
Are not our noblest feelings as it were the poems of our will.
Honore de Balzac
-
While guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and find a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell.
Hans Arp
-
I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems.
Robert Frost
-
To write incorporeal poems, almost without words. To approximate the impossible, where art disappears and the Word becomes.
Anna Kamienska
-
I don't like poems that invent memories, I have enough of my own.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
-
I always wanted to be some kind of writer - I wrote plays and songs and "books" before I realized living and breathing people still wrote poems.
Denise Duhamel
-
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.
Walt Whitman
-
The poems turned up everywhere. Soon the lady of the house went into fits of hysteria when she kept discovering this attack of poetry in the most unlikely places—under doors, in the mother-of-pearl latticework of windowpanes, under jars, stones, flowerpots, loaves of bread, and even delivered by homing pigeons, around whose rose-coloured claws the young matador lovingly wound poems in which he declaimed his love in the quaint language whose provenance was unknown to the world and still evoked images of the uninterrupted empires of Visigiths, the unbridled lust of the Huns and the intransigence of the Berbers. The young maiden recognized only a few words, but to her they were fragments of a secret music: zirimiri, fine rain; senaremaztac, husband and wife; nik behar diren guzian eginen ditut, I shall do everything necessary....
Eric Gamalinda
-
I don't want to write poems that are just really clear about how I'm aware of all the traps involved in writing poetry; I don't want to write fiction that's about the irresponsibility of writing fiction and I've thrown out a lot of writing that I think was ultimately tainted by that kind of self-awareness.
Ben Lerner
-
I don't write poems. I don't give flowers to girls... yet.
Rico Rodriguez
-
The world is so great and rich, and life so full of variety, that you can never lack occasions for poems.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
-
We had collaborated with Allen Ginsberg on one of his last projects just before he died in the spring of '97, a book called Illuminated Poems - it was Allen's poems and songs and I illustrated them. Or, I illuminated them with paintings and drawings that bounced off of them. You want the picture to relate to the text without it slavishly regurgitating it or merely illustrating it, because that's redundant. You want to show another angle of what the text is saying.
Eric Drooker
-
I have a little journal that I always keep with me, and when I need to, I'll write poems and things. It really helps to clear my head.
Haley Pullos
-
Poems are language turned into art; sound and sense matter; they can be as long or longer than The Odyssey or as short or shorter than a haiku. Not very helpful.
Campbell McGrath
-
And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future, And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turned to beautiful results, And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death, And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are compact, And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.
Walt Whitman
