Poet Black Quotes

#1. It is the black poet who bridges the gap in tradition, who modifies tradition when experience demands it, who translates experience into meaning and meaning into belief.

Henry Louis Gates

#2. So, I've never been politically correct, even before that term was available to us, and I have really identified with other people who don't want to be read as just a black poet, or just a woman poet, or just someone who represents a cause, an anti-Vietnam war poet.

Diane Wakoski

#3. He'd never believed that power, in any shape or form, was anything more than the intemperate protrusion on the egomaniacal heart. Since all egomaniacs were insecure to their frightened cores, they this weilded "power" barbarically so the world would not find them out

Dennis Lehane

#4. Who could imagine a poet wearing anything other than black?

Ann Demeulemeester

#5. Rick Black writes with the honed elegance of a poet so in command of lyric sentiment and the efficient evocative use of language that what results is indeed as urgent and vulnerable as true prayer ... There is something profoundly human and completely necessary about Star of David.

Kwame Dawes

#6. Whose starboard eye
Saw chariot 'swing low'?

James Weldon Johnson

#7. Four days. And she had two gay sons, a large black mother, a demented poet for a friend and was considering getting a duck. It was not what she'd expected from this visit.

Louise Penny

#8. My parents pushed us very hard to work, both in the home, doing chores and cooking, and at school.

Wendi Deng Murdoch

#9. I am a black man dedicated to expression; expression of the joy and pride of blackness. I consider myself neither poet, composer, or musician. These are merely tools used by sensitive men to carve out a piece of beauty or truth that they hope may lead to peace and salvation.

Gil Scott-Heron

#10. Black is not sad. Bright colors are what depresses me. They're so ... empty. Black is poetic. How do you imagine a poet? In a bright yellow jacket? Probably not.

Ann Demeulemeester

#11. I have got pictures all around the rooms I sit in. I have got a very mad picture of a dog standing on a black thing on a piece of rope. It was drawn and painted by a Romanian poet who was under house arrest, and it is terrific.

Jennifer Johnston

#12. If asked to list my ten favorite American fiction writers, Gail Godwin would be among them. In this, her latest ... she evokes in a short book the long married life of two artists. Evenings at Five is a strong tale of love-after-death.

Ned Rorem

#13. In the sense that I also try to reflect the fullness of the black experience, I'm very much a jazz poet.

Jayne Cortez

#14. I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible.

Audre Lorde

#15. Even the finest of jugglers cannot keep a hundred balls in the air forever.

George R R Martin

#16. I do not think I have ever seen a nastier-looking man ... Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist. [on Brit poet Percy Wyndham Lewis]

Ernest Hemingway,

#17. I'd spent way more years worrying about how to look like a poet
buying black clothes, smearing on scarlet lipstick, languidly draping myself over thrift-store furniture
than I had learning how to assemble words in some discernible order.

Mary Karr

#18. Introducing someone as a "Negro poet with a University degree" or again, quite simply, the expression, "a great black poet." These ready-made phrases, which seem in a common-sense way to fill a need-or have a hidden subtlety, a permanent rub.

Frantz Fanon

#19. Love is a word, another kind of open.
As the diamond comes
into a knot of flame
I am Black
because I come from the earth's inside
take my word for jewel
in the open light.

Audre Lorde

#20. Dwelling-place and food are useful for life but give it no significance: the immediate goals of the housekeeper are only means, not true ends.

Simone De Beauvoir

#21. The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character.

Robert Morgan

#22. Did the poet use red to symbolize blood? Anger? Lust? Or is the wheelbarrow simply red because red sounded better than black?

Jay Asher

#23. I am a black woman poet and I sound like one.

Lucille Clifton

#24. The way a source strains toward the light, toward the air. Its laboring work, its effort, its black passageways like despair. That's the way a poet looks for words. With muscles, gestures.

Anna Kamienska

#25. The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white.

Jonathan Lethem

#26. Perhaps ... I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am a lesbian, because I am myself
a Black woman warrior poet doing my work
come to ask you, are you doing yours?

Audre Lorde

#27. The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.

Audre Lorde

#28. Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing.

Countee Cullen

#29. Paint in blue and black ... sometimes gray - the colors of night - occasionally I surprise you with a mustard yellow, but then, I am a poet ...

John Geddes

#30. Poetry by its very nature is subversive ... It turns words inside out, confounds meaning, changes black and white to ambiguous shades of gray. Never trust a poet.

Cristina Garcia