Poem Quotes
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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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A poem should be odd as a small cast-iron platypus.
Dean Young
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I have no desire to dress up my poetry and make it fancy. I want the poem to be as true as humanly possible to the feeling that inspired it. That's my only concern. Everything else seems wrong.
Adelia Prado
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When a woman writes you a poem, she spends time with the gods on your behalf.
Aja Monet
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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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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 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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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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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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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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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
