Top 100 Bad Poetry Quotes
#1. Poetry
even bad poetry
may be our final hope.
Edward Abbey
#2. Because you fight it out, and stumble, and write bad poetry, and pick yourself up again, and at the end, hopefully, someday youre sitting with your kid on her bedroom floor, talking about how you screwed everything up too.
Josie Bloss
#3. I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.
Jacques Derrida
#4. If they succeed, you will not be packed off to some idyllic farm, where you can write bad poetry, we will both be executed.
A.H. Septimius
#5. The second was some rather bad poetry, but it was short, and I forced my way through by gritting my teeth and occasionally closing one eye so as not to damage the entirety of my brain.
Patrick Rothfuss
#6. All poets write bad poetry. Bad poets publish them, good poets burn them.
Umberto Eco
#7. For even bad poetry has relevance for what it does not say for what it leaves out.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#8. We've had a deal of bad poetry, haven't we? Suggesting the climax to this thrilling and literary spectacle. The Olla Podrida, my sweet-hearts, will now be set on the fire.
Dorothy Dunnett
#9. There are few things in this life more bamboo-under-fingernails than good poetry read aloud badly-unless it is bad poetry read aloud badly.
Josh Lanyon
#10. In his youth, Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was a bad man. Then he became good, abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles and wrote bad poetry.
Bertrand Russell
#11. Do good works or commission an opera house or just take it out and gaze at it longingly when you think of the handsome prince you might have made your own. For the record, I favor the latter option, preferably paired with copious tears and the recitation of bad poetry.
Leigh Bardugo
#12. One can be well-bred and write bad poetry
Moliere
#13. He's probably out there in the hallway right now, composing bad poetry in his head." Michi cleared her throat, her voice taking on a breathless lilt:
"Pale Fox's Daughter,
Her cherry lips haunt my dreams.
Something, something, breasts ...
Jay Kristoff
#14. Homosexuals are delicate and bad poetry is delicate and [Allen] Ginsberg turned the tables by making homosexual poetry strong poetry, almost manly poetry; but in the long run, the homo will remain the homo and not the poet.
Charles Bukowski
#15. The Major wished young men wouldn't think so much. It always seemed to result in absurd revolutionary movements or, as in the case of several of his former pupils, the production of very bad poetry.
Helen Simonson
#16. Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think, Now I am going to write a Poem.
Charles Bukowski
#17. What did you expect? That he'd send you flowers and write you bad poetry? That dead Nemean prowler is pretty much as close to a stuffed animal as you're ever going to get from a Spartan like Logan Quinn.
Jennifer Estep
#18. You know, bad poetry I wrote in high school can still be found on the Internet, and, you know, there's a Web log of our college newspaper. You know, there's so many different stages of my creative development are sort of on-record if somebody were to choose to look for them.
Lena Dunham
#19. I often tell people to stop being afraid of writing bad poetry, or bad anything. I think that a lot of times, when people claim that they have writer's block, or that they get stuck, it's just because they're scared of writing bad things.
Sarah Kay
#20. I began writing poetry when I was about 10. Bad poetry, but you start with bad poetry.
Jonas Mekas
#21. It's bad poetry executed by people that can't sing. That's my definition of Rap.
Peter Steele
#23. Mad Olia had a lot to say, and most of it was nonsensical, if it could be understood at all. Like bad poetry spoken underwater.
Charlie N. Holmberg
#24. Poets, on the face of it, have either got to be easier or to write their own notes; readers have either got to take more trouble over reading or cease to regard notes as pretentious and a sign of bad poetry
William Empson
#25. They are treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry.
Karl French
#26. My introduction, implicitly echoing Oscar Wilde's remark that all bad poetry is sincere, grants the benign social decency of [Stephen] King's fictions.
Harold Bloom
#27. I'd also heard that humans were a life-form of, at best, middling intelligence and prone to violence, deep sexual embarrassment, bad poetry, and walking around in circles.
Matt Haig
#28. Bad poetry is almost always bad because it attempts to claim for itself the real power of whatever it describes in ten lines: a sky full of stars, first love, or Niagara Falls.
Annie Dillard
#29. Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.
C.S. Lewis
#30. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
Oscar Wilde
#31. Life is about making mistakes. If you don't take chances, blindfolded and frightened as you are, you're not really living, are you? Heartache makes you stronger. Misery is the stuff of good poetry. You're denying yourself much more than the bad things in life by listening to Zita's fortunes.
Kimberly Karalius
#32. A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.
Paul Valery
#33. I think that at a certain age, say fifteen or sixteen, poetry is like masturbation. But later in life good poets burn their early poetry, and bad poets publish it. Thankfully I gave up rather quickly.
Umberto Eco
#34. Bad, quirky poetry might be better than some of the good stuff, because it really comes from the heart.
Cheryl Hines
#35. Love me like a wrong turn on a bad road
late at night.
Kim Addonizio
#36. Dreaming of getting you
I loosed everything
Cheerfulness of smile
And all the dreams of life
Hasil Paudyal
#37. All the world can be found in poetry. All you need to see and hear. All the moments, good and bad, joyous and sad.
Patricia MacLachlan
#38. If you find that the reader of popular romances
however uneducated a reader, however bad the romances
goes back to his old favourites again and again, then you have pretty good evidence that they are to him a sort of poetry.
C.S. Lewis
#39. If the art of poetry is?the art of making sense of the chaos of human experience, it's not a bad thing to see a lot of chaos.
Archibald MacLeish
#40. I wrote a fair amount of poetry in college. It was really, really bad. I mean, bad. And that's how I found out - by doing it.
John McPhee
#41. You chippy hunk of shit,/don't bad mouth me! I'm/the toughest guy in town, you don't know/who the hell you're in this room/with!
Charles Bukowski
#42. Poetry from the bottom up is an act of selection: you kind of feel your way through the crowds of poems. The good ones came forward a long time ago, and the bad ones fell away.
Eileen Myles
#43. During our first date,
I wanted to hold your hand so bad
I almost cut mine off
and threw it at you
to see if you would catch it
Colin Gilbert
#44. There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
Philip Larkin
#45. Bad breath and butt smell; that is prison, in a nutshell.
Raegan Butcher
#46. May be its mine bad-luck
Or yours not to get me
But I still have hope
Of being yours
Hasil Paudyal
#47. A poem is a form of refrigeration that stops language going bad.
Peter Porter
#48. We had scar-tissue
romance and ours was
a relationship of saying
goodbye - every time
we fought, every time
we fucked, and every time
we called it quits, before
picking up our knives
again
Phil Volatile
#49. Boston: Their hotels are bad. Their pumpkin pies are delicious. Their poetry is not so good.
Edgar Allan Poe
#50. There is hardly a limit to the knowledge and sympathy a man may have in respect of the finest things, and yet be a fool. Sympathy is not harmony. A man may be a poet even, and speak with the tongue of an angel, and yet be a very bad fool.
George MacDonald
#51. Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#52. Four billion people on this earth
but my imagination is still the same.
It's bad with large numbers.
It's still taken by particularity.
It flits in the dark like a flashlight,
illuminating only random faces
while all the rest go by,
never coming to mind and never really missed.
Wislawa Szymborska
#53. A satirical poet is the check of the laymen on bad priests.
John Dryden
#54. I think we will always have the impulse towards visual poetry with us, and I wouldn't agree with Bly that it's a bad thing. It depends on the ability of the individual poet to do it well, and to make a shape which is interesting enough to hold your attention.
James Laughlin
#55. There is a kind of poetry, bad and good, in everything, everywhere we look.
Ali Smith
#56. Give me another Chance
Then,
You will Get
Less than I Gain...
Hasil Paudyal
#57. Good or bad, positive or negative, there is no comment more insulting to a poet than one displaying that you have not properly read and considered the things they wrote.
Jasper Sole
#58. Now, whom are we here to conspire against?' 'Poetry,' I said. 'Namely, Romeo's poetry.' 'Is it that bad?
Rachel Caine
#59. In school, I hated poetry - those skinny,
Malnourished poems that professors love;
The bad grammar and dirty words that catch
In the mouth like fishhooks, tear holes in speech.
Pablo, your words are rain I run through,
Grass I sleep in.
George Elliott Clarke
#60. Well, probably I was fed up with concrete poetry. There was a lot of bad concrete poetry and besides, it was confused with visual poetry which was completely different.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
#61. One can never be sure whether it's good poetry or bad acid
Charles Bukowski
#62. No poetry that I'm aware of, however bad or glorious, has ever left somebody a worse person than they were before they read it.
Felix Dennis
#63. To his surprise he also discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something, whether painting or poetry, that you cared about a great deal.
Richard Russo
#64. We're all just animals. That's all we are, and everything else is just an elaborate justification of our instincts. That's where music comes from. And romantic poetry. And bad novels.
Elvis Costello
#65. My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.
T. S. Eliot
#66. Poetry is like fish: if it's fresh, it's good; if it's stale, it's bad; and if you're not certain, try it on the cat.
Osbert Sitwell
#67. Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events.
Louise Gluck
#68. We talk so abstractly about poetry because all of us are usually bad poets.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#69. We were romantics. We didn't just read poetry. We let it drip from our tongues like honey. Spirits soared. Women swooned, and gods were created, gentlemen. Not a bad way to spend an evening, eh?
Robin Williams
#70. Life doesn't stop. It doesn't stop progressing forward and it never stops trying to bring you to your knees. It will test your strengths and exploit your weakness, and I'm not sure that is always such a bad thing.
Christy Aldridge
#71. Some stars are large, and some are small,
And some are quite invisiball!
Walter R. Brooks
#72. But the worst of it was, all the third-rate poets emerged unscathed; being third-rate, they didn't know good poetry from bad and consequently had no inkling of their crushing defeat.
Stanislaw Lem
#73. you are
as fleetingly beautiful
as a mother's tears
and a father's pranks
a brother's bachelorhood
and a best friend's bad mood
a bride's glittering jitters
and a handsome stranger's smile.
Sanober Khan
#74. Trying too hard to be too good, even when trying to be bad, is too good for the bad, too bad for the good.
Dejan Stojanovic
#75. Springwater grow so thick it gonna clot and the pleasing ladies cease. I figure, yup, you is bad powers.
John Berryman
#76. If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
Ben Lerner
#77. As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.
Adrienne Rich
#78. Political means so many things. We are political willy-nilly. Political poetry is an easy invitation to disaster. But then so is love poetry. But we are a little more patient with bad love poetry.
Gerald Stern
#79. Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous. There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can't handle.
James Dickey
#80. Bad bananas are like push-up bras
a promise of tenderness can deliver tasteless mush, and we're not supposed to complain.
Kate Lebo
#81. It is always hard for poets to believe that one says their poems are bad not because one is a fiend but because their poems are bad.
Randall Jarrell
#82. I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem.
Marilyn Hacker
#83. Steep fall to the ground
shattering
like clay pigeons
missed
by bad shots
and unsteady hands.
Jessica Kristie
#84. Be them good times,
Be them bad times,
I swear to you
They never last!
Maddy Kobar
#85. Doeg, though without knowing how or why,
Made still a blundering kind of melody;
Spurr'd boldly on, and dash'd through thick and thin,
Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in;
Free from all meaning whether good or bad,
And in one word, heroically mad.
John Dryden
#86. The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.
George Bernard Shaw
#87. He could guide anyone to the point of no return. He'd corral them with poetry, music, invoking the alcoholic gods that all died young. But we were so young, we didn't know we had anything we would miss.
Hannah Lillith Assadi
#88. I wrote poetry in middle school and high school and even through college. It was bad. I just don't think I'm very good at writing poetry. I mean, the distillation, I think, is hard for me, but I love poetry.
Jesmyn Ward
#89. Climbed that roost, alighted right there.
Made mush of his head for the onlooker bears.
A two-pronger her prize, a meat most rare.
Do-gooders will pay. Do-gooders will fear.
Darrell Drake
#90. I'm not against ambition and reach, but if you can say it in four lines, why waste your time saying it in more? Challenge the world by all means, but it's bad for your poetry to take steroids.
Michael Longley
#91. The view of the highway was so bad that you could not even see the next viaduct. Te moment it loomed out of the mist it disappeared again, as if the world created itself and was blotted out again.
Janet Fitch
#92. I am an ordinary human being who is impelled to write poetry ... I still do feel that a poet has a duty to words, and that words can do wonderful things, and it's too bad to just let them lie there without doing anything with and for them.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#93. Poetry should make you feel good, life's already full of possibilities that make you feel bad. But, there's always the needed philosophical poem that puts you back into a reality that might not be so pleasant.
K.R. Royal
#94. But bad manners or vulgar gestures can sometimes have a touch of poetry about them, just enough not to arouse one's indignation.
Tahar Ben Jelloun
#95. It got so bad that Al thought
maybe it was
him
so he went to a shrink
and asked
and the shrink said,
"you're one of the sanest men
I've ever met."
poor Al.
that made him feel
worse
than ever.
Charles Bukowski
#96. Adios
Her pretty picture
lying on the
ground was like
the toppling
of some
fascist
regime
And burning
the photograph,
was the
celebration
Phil Volatile
#97. To expect to be kissed having bad breath is the secret of a fool.
Dejan Stojanovic
#98. Despair leads to boredom, electronic games, computer hacking, poetry and other bad habits.
Edward Abbey
#99. I do not blame him
for not knowing
the gentleness of my soul.
When I only showed him,
how violently
I loved.
Saiber
#100. A single wire hanger on a nail by itself
Isn't bad though a stack of them on a floor
Is too gloomy for words.
Dara Weir
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