Poem Quotes
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I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past.
Ben Lerner
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What is WIND and what is BONE have never been conclusively determined by the generations of Chinese critics, but what is certain, according to Liu Hsieh, is that the perfect combination or balance of WIND and BONE, the metaphor for the ideal poem, is a bird.
Eliot Weinberger
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The Orphic Machine is the poem: a severed head with face turned away that sings.
Allen Grossman
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Indeed, what says more: the few lines of a tightly written poem or a volume of analytical comments on it? The communicative ability of artifacts depends on how the work of negotiating meaning is distributed between reification and participation.
Etienne Wenger
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Our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable to to experience, if not a genuine poem—no such thing—a place for the genuine, whatever that might mean.
Ben Lerner
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It’s a hymn of the heretic, a piyut liturgical poem of a modern, doubtful person.
Alan Light
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I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer.
Denise Levertov
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When I feel something very intensely or deeply or personally, I can go to extremes of self-expression or self-analysis by writing a poem - more than I can just talking to somebody or writing prose.
Jimmy Carter
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Poetry arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical - the human world of violence and difference - and to reach the transcendent or divine. You’re moved to write a poem… But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. In a dream your verses can defeat time, your words can shake off the history of their usage, you can represent what can’t be represented, but when you wake, when you rejoin your friends around the fire, you’re back in the human world with its inflexible laws and logic.
Ben Lerner
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It was like how, when he read a poem to himself, the rhymes were neither sound nor silence. Unheard melodies in the mind’s ear. The muted music of consciousness.
Ben Lerner
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Every day look at a beautiful picture, read a beautiful poem, listen to some beautiful music, and if possible, say some reasonable thing.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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If the poem has no obvious destination, there's a chance that we'll be all setting off on an interesting ride.
Paul Muldoon
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Men are so inclined to content themselves with what is commonest; the spirit and the senses so easily grow dead to the impressions of the beautiful and perfect, that every one should study, by all methods, to nourish in his mind the faculty of feeling these things. ...For this reason, one ought every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“Who do you serve? Do you serve somebody?
I serve the poem, no one.
Alice Notley
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What's interesting about songs where the writer is genuinely in love with words is that it's easy to read the lyrics like a poem.
Ann Reed
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I write one poem a year, usually in January or February.
Emily Susan Rapp
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Do not wait for a poem; a poem is too fast for you. Do not wait for the poem; run with the poem and then write the poem.
Juan Felipe Herrera
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My secret dream is to write an epic poem. That's probably the most pretentious thing I've said.
Laurie Anderson
