Quotes Tagged "poetry"

I used the word 'prose' in the Trans-Siberian in the early Latin sense of prosa dictu. Poem seemed to me too pretentious, too narrow. Prose is more open, popular.

A Rough Guide Be polite at the reception desk. Not all the knives are in the museum. The waitresses know that a nice boy is formed in the same way as a deckchair. Pay for the beer and send flowers. Introduce yourself as Richard. Do not refer to what somebody did at a particular time in the past. Remember, every Friday we used to go for a walk. I walked. You walked. Everything in the past is irregular. This steak is very good. Sit down. There is no wine, but there is ice cream. Eat slowly. I have many matches.

Wild creatures' eyes, the colonel said, Are innocent and fathomless And when I look at them I see That they are not aware of me And oh I find and oh I bless A comfort in this emptiness They only see me when they want To pounce upon me at the hunt; But in the tame variety There couches an anxiety As if they yearned, yet knew not what They yearned for, nor they yearned for not. And so my dog would look at me And it was pitiful to see Such love and such dependency. The human heart is not at ease With animals that look like these.

You bend the nail But keep hammering because Hammering makes the world

Carcharadon carcharias. Six thousand pounds of muscle powering a hoop of butcher's knives. The only animal that ate its weaker siblings in the womb. Immune from cancer. Constantly awake.

Poetry is a way of coming to know the realness of things; fiction is a way of coming to know the world of relationships; nonfiction is a way of coming to know the world of the mind.

. . . poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value.

Ted: A fucking good poem is a weapon. It's-- and not like a-- a popgun or something. - It's a bomb. It's like a bloody big bomb. Sylvia: That’s why they make children learn them in school. They don't want them messing about with them on their own. I mean, just imagine if a sonnet went off accidentally. Boom.

the next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern.

I am five, I will never understand why we are stranded in our selves but in this moment I know my own story is understanding our singleness that I am destined to move my body and time into the body-time the story of Others.

It is not growing like a tree In bulk, doth make Man better be; Or standing long an oak, three hundred year, To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere: A lily of a day Is fairer far in May Although it fall and die that night; It was the plant and flower of Light. In small proportions we just beauties see; And in short measures life may perfect be (Ben Jonson)

. . .criticism is to poetry as air is to a noise: it allows it to be heard; and even if we can't see it or feel it, it is there, shaping how we hear.

Tho' you're tired and weary, still journey on, Till you come to your happy abode, Where all the love you've been dreaming of, Will be there at the end of the road.

The journey back is always longer than the forward run.

Evil is not good's absence but gravity's everlasting bedrock and its fatal chains inert, violent, the suffrage of our days.

We left you there, lonely, Beauty your power, Wisdom your watchman, To hold the clay tower. from 'The Tale of the Tiger Tree

My vegetable love will grow Vaster than empires, and more slow.

Yo, múltiple, como en contradicción

Streets paved with opal sadness, Lead me counterclockwise, to pockets of joy, And jazz.

My name used to be in the papers daily As having dined somewhere, Or traveled somewhere, Or rented a house in Paris, Where I entertained the nobility. I was forever eating or traveling, Or taking the cure at Baden-Baden. Now I am here to do honor To Spoon River, here beside the family whence I sprang. No one cares now where I dined, Or lived, or whom I entertained, Or how often I took the cure at Baden-Baden!