Quotes About Black Poetry

#1. Black Poetry is not for Black People ... it is for everybody

Nikki Giovanni

#2. This is the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America: that we persist, published or not, and loved or unloved: we persist.

June Jordan

#3. Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious temperament and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile?

Aristotle.

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. The poetry you read has been written for you, each of you - black, white, Hispanic, man, woman, gay, straight.

Maya Angelou

#7. I opened my veins. Unstoppably life spurts out with no remedy. Now I set out bowls and plates. Every bowl will be shallow. Every plate will be small. And overflowing their rims, into the black earth, to nourish the rushes unstoppably without cure, gushes poetry ...

Marina Tsvetaeva

#8. I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best - I mean, when I'm at my best - of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.

Maya Angelou

#9. There was something musical about Ronan when he swore, a careful and loving precision to the way he fit the words together, a black-painted poetry. It was far less hateful sounding than when he didn't swear.

Maggie Stiefvater

#10. The wheel of Time wrote the first half of the poetry of mass destruction on the black board of the ashes of a funeral ground by dint of a pair of pens of nuclear bombs.

Manmohan Acharya

#11. Go. Think. Turn black into white.
Night into day. I am tired of thinking.
I know where it will lead me and I don't
Want to be there.
Go love. Do your thinking.

Walter Dean Myers

#12. I was only sitting here in my white study
with the awful black words pushing me around.

Anne Sexton

#13. Especially in the world today, where science rightfully is so important in terms of technology, innovation, telecom, Internet, fighting diseases, I think it's equally important that poetry and painting have their share of support.

Leon Black

#14. My heart is small, like a love of buttons or black pepper.

S. Jane Sloat

#15. I see a bright
portion
under the overhead light
that shades into
darkness
and then into darker
darkness
and I can't see beyond that.

Charles Bukowski

#16. It was as though she practiced some shameful art: black magic, voodoo, or poetry.

Valerie Martin

#17. Black drinks the sun and draws all colours into it.
I am bleached white, my truant love. Come back,
and stain me with the intensity of black.

Robert Graves

#18. My early attempts writing plays, which are very poetic, did not use the language that I work in now. I didn't recognize the poetry in everyday language of black America. I thought I had to change it to create art.

August Wilson

#19. Think of what starlight
And lamplight would lack
Diamonds and fireflies
If they couldn't lean against Black ...

Mary O'Neill

#20. A black cat among roses,
phlox, lilac-misted under a quarter moon,
the sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock. The garden is very still.
It is dazed with moonlight,
contented with perfume ...

Amy Lowell

#21. And me, standing under the splintered night,
catching fractured glimpses into the black behind the black,
hearing the prayers of stars, the angry whispers of the dark summer night.

Its voice cracks,
on your name.

My eyes close,
on your name.

Marlen Komar

#22. I dared fix my eyes one instant toward glory:
a black point is settled in my avid eye.

Joanna McClure

#23. The BALLPOINT PENGUINS, black and white,
Do little else but write and write.
Although they've nothing much to say,
They write and write it anyway ...

Jack Prelutsky

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

Countee Cullen

#25. a generation:
the black night gave me black eyes
still I use them to seek the light

Gu Cheng

#26. Today is Sunday
It will be Sunday forever
Black birds fly over
In this one instance
May we never recover
From this one new something
We are just starting to discover

Lourd Ernest H. De Veyra

#27. Is this where the light faded out forever?
Where the cat was finally killed by caught tongue?
Where hand no longer wandered over curious texture?
Where words no longer moved past lips but died in a quiver?

Mellon Black

#28. 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

#29. Do not trap yourself into an owl's hooting sound
where sad nights linger through the blackness of a hound

Munia Khan

#30. Aflame in black ecstasy, orders extinguished:
after death
how will I know my love was true,
this sacrifice not an exercise in vanity?

Phan Ming Yen

#31. And this is when I knew I was black for real.
This is when I knew black was a city
whose walls were constantly under siege....

Roger Bonair-Agard

#32. Whiteness is the color of death, you know, not black. Wetness is life, the breeder and shaper of life. In the beginning the sun was black. So all light was absorbed before it had a chance to return. And our dreams, then, were empty.

Jim Carroll

#33. Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface.

Osip Mandelstam

#34. One fine day, in the middle of the night, two dead boys got up to fight. Back to back they faced each other. They pulled out their swords and shot one another. One deaf cop, on the beat heard the noise, and came and shot the two dead boys.

Holly Black

#35. I am often asked why I started to write poetry. The answer is that my motivation sprang from a visceral need to creatively articulate the experiences of the black youth of my generation, coming of age in a racist society.

Linton Kwesi Johnson

#36. Though she appeared confected of sugar and air, there was a bitter black walnut at her core.

Lauren Groff

#37. I find a lot of poetry very disappointing, but I do have poets that I go back to. One book of poetry that I'd like to mention is 'The Exchange' by Sophie Cabot Black. Her poems are difficult without being too difficult.

Billy Collins

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

James Weldon Johnson

#39. At dawn, the grains of sleep turn to floating black spots, then out of focus the world tilts, and the cat scratches at the door ...

John Geddes

#40. A radiant full moon of silver hangs in the black sky, between the veils of misty clouds.

Moonshine Noire

#41. i am like the moon--
sometimes, full.
sometimes, black.

sometimes,
forever and ever alone.

AVA.

#42. I got married to Chris Sarandon, who was a graduate student, and he knew everything at that point, I thought, because he was older. He introduced me to poetry and black-and-white movies.

Susan Sarandon

#43. My gray zone is starting to include poetry here white is not absolute white black is not absolute black the edges of these non-colors adjoin

Tadeusz Rozewicz

#44. Poetry has acquired a fluffy image, which is totally at odds with its real nature. It's not pastel colours, but blood-red and black. If you don't obey it as a force in your life, it will tear you to pieces.

Gwyneth Lewis

#45. That day, that day when I can gaze at the sea
both of us calm
and I, trusting, having poured my whole heart into my Life Work ... when death
black waves!
no longer courts me and I can smile, constantly, at everything because, my bones, there will be so little of myself left to give it.

Juan Ramon Jimenez

#46. Recipe For Happiness Khaborovsk Or Anyplace'
One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups.
One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you.
One fine day.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#47. And we are put on earth a little space,
that we may learn to bear the beams of love;
And these black bodies and this sunburnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

William Blake

#48. Now that Karen has been resurrected, I can travel beyond the black mirror. I can discover who I have lost with the
floating hearts and severed heads of my medicine. I must now whisper my other friends back too. I'm sad they're gone ... sad and blue.

Nicholaus Patnaude

#49. Poetry distracts me from going deeper over ... the edge. it is rough and shiny like black diamonds.it dazzles,it enhances,your everything. Each moment,every memory, you touch.

Emily H. Sturgill

#50. It was when she started dealing coke so she could lose weight. It had worked, sort of. I think she still has a fat ass, and can look dumpy, and has dried-out black hair and writes awful poetry and I'm pissed off that I let her get into that position of denying me.

Bret Easton Ellis

#51. I also learned to tell a story. I think I learned from poetry how to time a story. Poetry's timing, beats and pauses. That white space on the page is as important as the black. The bottom of the page is blackout. It's performance.

Sandra Cisneros

#52. No reprimand in the mirror
Slow walk to Liberia
Slow dance across the Sahara
Slow unraveling of gray matter

Mellon Black

#53. These words are my mother's,
my father's, my brother's, my lender's, my garbage
man's - the poem runs
like oil on fire
beneath this earth where we know each other.
Witness the black smoke everywhere.

B.J. Ward

#54. When I was writing pretty poor poetry, this girl with midnight black hair told me to go on.

Carl Sandburg

#55. In the dark I rest,
unready for the light which dawns
day after day,
eager to be shared.
Black silk, shelter me.
I need
more of the night before I open
eyes and heart
to illumination. I must still
grow in the dark like a root
not ready, not ready at all.

Denise Levertov

#56. The trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans. I say, the trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans.

Nikki Giovanni