Poems Quotes
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
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
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
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
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
To write incorporeal poems, almost without words. To approximate the impossible, where art disappears and the Word becomes.
Anna Kamienska
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
The night before, I'd gone overboard with my Lila poems, and maybe it's true that I was hoping that in them he'd see the genius of me, the beauty of my words in his hands.
Beth Kephart
I don't think of writing my poems for China or for the world. I mainly think of a small audience of friends and people I know. I am writing for that small group. They are not necessarily going to be able to read it, but that's what I have in mind when I write.
Bei Dao
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
I don't like poems that invent memories, I have enough of my own.
Andre Naffis-Sahely
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
