Poem Quotes

When a woman writes you a poem, she spends time with the gods on your behalf.

Aja Monet
- Woman
- Poem
- Writes
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
- Balance
- Wind
- Critics

The Orphic Machine is the poem: a severed head with face turned away that sings.

Allen Grossman
- Face
- Poem
- Sings
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
- True
- Inspired
- Poem
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
A poem should be odd as a small cast-iron platypus.

Dean Young
- Poem
- Odd
- Platypus
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
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