Poem Quotes
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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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I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry mouth is prest Against the earth's sweet flowing breast.
Joyce Kilmer
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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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A picture is poem without words.
Confucius
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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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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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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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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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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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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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...a good poem contains both meaning and music.
Eve Merriam
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An unromantic poem I mean to make, of one who only lives for duty's sake.
Henrik Ibsen
