Poems Quotes
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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
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What we feel is beyond words. We should be ashamed of our poems.
Nizar Qabbani
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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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Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life.
Henry Ward Beecher
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Memory, faith, and the natural world as both witness to the cycle of human life and healer to a questioning heart are at the core of this lovely and lyrical collection of poems. The weather changes, people come and go from cities and towns, babies are born, grow up and depart from their parents’ arms, but still, the countryside and its rituals sustain the people and creatures who know how to read the signs of the seasons. In these pages, Laura Grace Weldon shares those signs with us; her poems are the fruit of a wonderful harvest.
Eleanor Lerman
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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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...no matter what any poet did, the poems would constitute screens on which readers could project their own desperate belief in the possibility of poetic experience, whatever that might be, or afford them the opportunity to mourn its impossibility.
Ben Lerner
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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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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
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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 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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I've been interested in LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's work for quite a while. My first introduction to LeRoi Jones was when my mother used to read me the 'Dead Lecturer' poems when I was a kid.
Rashid Johnson
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. . . you did not seem to me over-fond of money. And this is the way in general with those who have not made it themselves, while those who have are twice as fond of it as anyone else. For just as poets are fond of their own poems, and fathers of their own children, so money-makers become devoted to money, not only because, like other people, they find it useful, but because it's their own creation.
Plato
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I don't write every day, but if I go more than a couple of months without writing, I begin to get a little nervous. I usually have bursts of poems. Five or six come together and then I slack off and want to do something else.
Elaine Equi
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We write poems as leaves give oxygen - so we can breathe.
Erica Jong
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I can never plan out what direction my poems will take in terms of either form or content. I wish I could but it doesn't work that way for me. If I try to write something, I'd probably end up doing the opposite.
Elaine Equi
