Poem Quotes
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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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The [book of the bible] Song Of Songs is an amazing erotic love poem that the church has tried very hard not to notice. It is really beautiful, and musical in its poetry.
Alan Green
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You're looking for something, I don't know what I'm looking for, but I'm looking. Writing is a lot about that. When you write a poem. When you write a novel.
Alejandro Zambra
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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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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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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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It’s a hymn of the heretic, a piyut liturgical poem of a modern, doubtful person.
Alan Light
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This is what you should do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men ... re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss what insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.
Walt Whitman
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I write one poem a year, usually in January or February.
Emily Susan Rapp
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A poem in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth.
Edgar Allan Poe
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Reading a good poem can give me a far bigger kick than a novel. But it's not something I can keep doing. It would be like shooting up 10 times a day.
Stephen Dobyns
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Each poem seems to demand its own formal approach. In both drafting and revision, I'll play around with line lengths and stanza formations, eventually letting the poem settle into what I think is its own best form.
Allison Joseph
