Poems Quotes
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Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, You shall possess the good of the earth and sun.... there are millions of suns left, You shall no longer take things at second or third hand.... nor look through the eyes of the dead.... nor feed on the spectres in books, You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.
Walt Whitman
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I believe it's impossible to write good poetry without reading. Reading poetry goes straight to my psyche and makes me want to write. I meet the muse in the poems of others and invite her to my poems. I see over and over again, in different ways, what is possible, how the perimeters of poetry are expanding and making way for new forms.
Denise Duhamel
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With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.
Marge Piercy
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Since the age of 11, I have loved writing poems and fragments from my life.
Niki de Saint Phalle
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If we were to see Western landay poems, we'd see them out of disenfranchised populations, maybe out of the legacy of slavery. Spirituals, rap music - that would be the space we'd find American landays in.
Eliza Griswold
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Many of my poems try to use a comic element to reach a place that isn't comic at all. The comic element works as a surprise. It is unexpected and energizing.
Stephen Dobyns
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I can explain all the poems that were ever invented - and a good many that haven't been invented just yet.
Lewis Carroll
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My days are filled with work I love - reading poems, writing poems, talking with people about poems, teaching, directing a writing program, hosting readings, etc.
Deborah Landau
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What we need are poems that interrogate the world of pronouns, open up possibilities of language and life; forms of politics that support and encourage self-affirmation.
Judith Butler
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Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? have you reckoned the earth much? Have you practised so long to learn to read? Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?
Walt Whitman
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There is a particular quality of quietude and stillness that suffuses these painterly poems of Carol Ann Davis, so involved with loss, motherhood and the shifting tonalities of light that transform the domestic and ordinary into the strange and extraordinary that, combined with tenderness of address, approach the worshipful and make a number of these poems so moving and distinctive.
August Kleinzahler
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The poems are part of my attempt to understand being in the world in an honest way.
Dan Beachy-Quick
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When I think of someone equating poems and machines, it makes me feel like that person would like poems to have a more obvious use value in society. They're not happy with poetry being this ephemeral, indefinable thing. They want it to be "real."
Elaine Equi
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Poems, like dreams, are a sort of royal road to the unconscious. They tell you what your secret self cannot express.
Erica Jong
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Fine natures are like fine poems; a glance at the first two lines suffices for a guess into the beauty that waits you if you read on.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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I think of my best poems as vessels that I can or hope to fill with everything I have. I try to give to them all of the electric complexity. Each one fails at this, of course, but I keep trying - adoring each of them, loving the process, the ebb and flow of it - and each time, the failures fail a bit better.
Alex Lemon
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My poems are more my silence than my speech. Just as music is a kind of quiet. Sounds are needed only to unveil the various layers of silence.
Anna Kamienska
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We write poems as leaves give oxygen - so we can breathe.
Erica Jong
