Top 100 Quotes About Poems
#1. I had hoped to be a poet, and for a long time I tried to write poetry. My first published pieces were poems.
Norman Lock
#2. I am completing a book I began back in 2002 called 'Poems in the Manner of.' 'The Matador of Metaphor' is from this manuscript. It is an homage to Wallace Stevens that appropriates certain of his techniques.
David Lehman
#4. Billy Collins writes lovely poems. Limpid, gently and consistently startling, more serious than they seem, they describe all the worlds that are and were and some others besides.
John Updike
#5. Macmillan's rejection had left him very downcast ... Patrick Swift was invited to peruse the contents and decided that the poems should be published.
Patrick Kavanagh
#6. Reading a stranger's words and finding yourself in them.
Jenim Dibie
#7. When I'm assembling a book I concentrate as though I were writing a poem. A truly imagined arrangement will indicate gaps and generate new poems. I re-read the new poems in my folder in the hope that this might happen.
Michael Longley
#8. His conversation was full of imagination, and very often in limitation of ther Persian, and Arabic writers, he invented tales of wonderful fancy and passion. At other times he repeated my fsvorite poems or drew me out into arguments, wich he suported with great ingenuity.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#9. For me poems are acts re-done, and that can vibrate well into the future.
Anne Waldman
#10. everything i know about love
is that it hurts
and is almost always never returned
the way you want it to.
but i have hope
because i do not know everything.
AVA.
#11. Steep fall to the ground
shattering
like clay pigeons
missed
by bad shots
and unsteady hands.
Jessica Kristie
#12. keep following your heart.
it won't always be easy, but it'll be the most important thing you'll do.
AVA.
#14. Following dark winter's strife, a warm air rises, teemed with life. Birth, rebirth, as the waiting die. Old love, new love sprouts wings to fly.
Phar West Nagle
#15. your smile.
is the ultimate
golden dream.
all the poems
in the world
are waking up from.
Sanober Khan
#16. I read somewhere that dedications are like coded love letters,
but I always seem to lay us out bare.
Sorry for the poems.
Unknown
#17. Poetry seldom occurs in poems. Poetry only occurs when words cause action.
Raoul Vaneigem
#18. Here are poems from a new generation of writers who honor the magnetic fields of the real; who feel and think with full and open-eyed passion; who focus heat as the magnifying glass focuses sun: until the paper catches. Read them.
Jane Hirshfield
#19. remember you are capable of the most powerful thing in the universe.
you are capable of love.
AVA.
#20. I want to write poems which are very emotional, but I would have some hesitation in saying I want to write poems which are sentimental.
Andrew Motion
#21. Sometimes the rain
falls
just for you and me
to be the violin
playing
in the background
of our loneliness's song.
Sanober Khan
#22. I don't write poems and put them to music. Just let things flow.
Martin Gore
#23. Maybe because I can't even put together an IKEA desk, I've never been tempted to think of my own poems as built objects - but I do sometimes imagine them as mathematical constructs.
James Arthur
#24. I
Like
The Way
That when you
Tilt
Poems
On their side
They
Look like
Miniature
Cities
From
A long way
Away.
Skyscrapers
Made out
Of
Words.
Matt Haig
#25. I am the poet, you are the poem; I hold the pen, you are the words, love is the ink, silence is the blank page.
Jenim Dibie
#26. When I think of Robert Frost's poems, like "The Road Not Taken", I feel the support of someone who is on my side, who understands what life's choices are like, someone who says, "I've been there, and it's okay to go on".
Fred Rogers
#27. I finally understood that I didn't lack pen and paper but my own
memorizing mind. It had been given away with a hundred poems, called
rote learning, old-fashioned, backward, an enemy of creative thinking,
a great human gift disowned.
Grace Paley
#28. It is so hard to stay afloat in a world
that just wants to drown you.
Schuyler Peck
#29. It used to be that one poet in each generation performed poems in public. In the twenties, it was Vachel Lindsay, who sometimes dropped to his knees in the middle of a poem. Then Robert Frost took over, and made his living largely on the road.
Donald Hall
#30. Somewhere back a whiskey or so ago I wrote that thinking was a real thing in the world, just like anything else. I mean that very literally, materially. And it's true about poems, too.
Matthew Zapruder
#31. There's one of my new poems actually - is a good example of where my poetry has ended up. My earlier river poetry was more like a cross between Shelley and Dylan Thomas.
Robert Adamson
#32. some winters
will never melt
some summers
will never freeze
and some things will only
... live in poems.
Sanober Khan
#33. It snowed right before Jack stopped talking to Hazel, fluffy white flakes big enough to show their crystal architecture, like perfect geometric poems.
Anne Ursu
#34. I started off in England and very few people knew I was Australian. I mean, the clues were in the poems, but they didn't read them very carefully, and so for years and years I was considered completely part of the English poetry scene.
Peter Porter
#35. Poems ... are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again,
Jane Hirshfield
#36. Frederick Turner comes across in his poems as a man of impressively broad experience, intellectual brilliance, and originality. ... He's at his best when he unleashes his extraordinary powers of observation.
Richard Tillinghast
#37. It is strange," Mr. Willoughby said, and the air of reflection in his voice was echoed exactly by Jamie's, "but it was my joy of women that Second Wife saw and loved in my words. Yet by desiring to possess me - and my poems - she would have forever destroyed what she admired." Mr.
Diana Gabaldon
#38. One Christmas I had no money, and so I went home and just, like, wrote a poem; I mean, I didn't write them, but I just handed out poems as Christmas presents. Like, 'Here's a Pablo Neruda poem that really made me think of you.'
June Diane Raphael
#39. A collection of plants is not a landscape, any more than a list of choice words is a poem. The merit is in the design, not the material it is expressed in, and the best designs, like the best poems, make ordinary material significant by its arrangement.
Nan Fairbrother
#40. TO FOREIGN LANDS. I heard that you ask'd for something to prove this puzzle the New World, And to define America, her athletic Democracy, Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted.
Walt Whitman
#41. When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to.
Thom Gunn
#42. All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.
Paul Auster
#43. every choice i have ever made after you existed
has been dependent on exactly
how close i can have you next to me
and how long i can get you to stay.
AVA.
#44. I was intoxicated by the romantic poetry of our great writers. I arranged the world according to my private use, looking at it through the poems I had devoured.
Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont
#45. If you were going to make sculptures of them, the swivel poems would be disparate objects all attached with hinges and the prose poems would be small sheep wrapped in extra wool.
Matthea Harvey
#47. I balance you
on the end of my pen.
Teetering between love
and letting go.
Jessica Kristie
#48. And when my second book had come out, "Wild Gratitude," I went to Pearl London's class and she worked through different drafts of poems and there were the drafts of my poem, Wild Gratitude, and I saw that I had begun the poem with the title August 13th.
Edward Hirsch
#49. He who would write heroic poems should make his whole life a heroic poem.
Thomas Carlyle
#50. i am changing
and i am loving change.
AVA.
#51. Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn't. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.
Fernando Pessoa
#52. I'd like to ask you a question, if I may."
"What?"
"All these poems you've written and hidden - so many poems. Why?"
While she thought, morning broke and the birds sang in the garden. "Because I could not stop.
Jeffrey Ford
#53. To return to the moment of radical innocence. To paint. To stretch canvas. To find the point of originality. It wasn't a hippie idea. Both of us always hated the hippies, their flowers, their poems, their one idea. We were the furthest thing from hippies. We were the edge, the definers.
Colum McCann
#54. everyone is in a hurry and things are always disappearing, and i am always left standing here--
alone, waiting for the things that stay.
AVA.
#55. If you have a bright idea with such significance, don't pause but push, play and display that concept, it will be recognized or be seen somehow and it will not be forsaken.
( Taken from my forthcoming book " Ency Bearis' Ameliorated Poems" )
Ency Bearis
#56. Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.
Jonathan Safran Foer
#57. I am very close to HIM, sometimes I think I am HIM, with my mood is the weather,bright and sunny forever.
Santosh Kalwar
#58. no one needs love from you
more than you need love from you.
love yourself first,
and you will always be in love.
AVA.
#59. Matt smirked. Well, it is interesting because lots of poems have mathematical imagery or structure. Concrete triangular poems and syllabic verse, for example. Did you know that we subconsciously track the sound properties in poetry?
Jessica Park
#60. A sky
full
of stars
and he
was staring
at her.
- ATTICUS
Atticus Poetry
#61. To write incorporeal poems, almost without words. To approximate the impossible, where art disappears and the Word becomes.
Anna Kamienska
#62. You listen to people, you listen so deeply that you can hear their past lives,
The crackle of their funeral pyres,
Dick Allen
#63. Today we should make poems including iron and steel And the poet should know how to lead an attack.
Ho Chi Minh
#64. Like a speeding train
I am passing by...
I don't know
where I'm heading
with whom or why
all I know is that
I will never, ever
pass from here again
all I know is I'm skidding forward
on this track of life.
Sanober Khan
#65. The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.
Jane Hirshfield
#66. In other words the pictures are in a kind of relationship with each other which is touching only at points rather than pictures being illustrations of poems or poems extrapolations of the pictures.
Peter Porter
#67. the hope is small
but it is everything.
AVA.
#68. One of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced.
John Dryden
#69. A poem in the heart is worth
more than a million dollars
in the bank account.
Sanober Khan
#70. My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience.
Sharon Olds
#71. Poems have their own fates, like children. You have only to give birth to them.
Andrei Voznesensky
#72. I see the progress typical in some of my poems as starting with something simple and moving into something more demanding. This is certainly the pattern of weird poetry.
Billy Collins
#73. I write poems for myself and I write poetry that gets torn apart and becomes songs. I have a lot of respect for words, the power of words.
Kurt Cobain
#74. 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
#75. Talk of poems and prayers and promises, and things that we believe in. How sweet it is to love someone, how right it is to care, how long it's been since yesterday.
John Denver
#76. It lies here deep in the heart, the small chest of pain
Sharp words like daggers placed it here
To fill with hurt
In filling it grew heavy and drug me down
For to not feel is not to live
Until I rest at last in dirt
The worst of you got the best of me ...
Neil Leckman
#77. If poems very different from my own bring pleasure to a group of readers, who am I to say that the poems should have been written differently?
James Arthur
#78. stay curious and stay the brave, strong, unrelenting soldier of love that you are.
AVA.
#79. show me all the parts of you
that you do not love
so i know where to begin.
AVA.
#80. The dark night was the first book of poetry and the constellations were the poems.
Chet Raymo
#81. You are afraid to let anyone in, but you still leave the door open, hoping someone good will shut the door behind him and throw away the keys.
Jenim Dibie
#82. In Damascus:
poems become diaphanous
They're neither sensual
nor intellectual
they are what echo says
to echo ...
Mahmoud Darwish
#83. I've never seen beauty
so devastating
as in the lines
that trace our hope
and fall from the stars.
Jessica Kristie
#84. She was afraid of heights
but she was
much more afraid
of never flying.
Atticus Poetry
#85. They want to know
who I write these poems for.
Tell them it's for all lovers
because I don't see a difference
between our love
and their love.
Kamand Kojouri
#86. I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.
David Antin
#87. I started out wanting to write great poems, then wanting to discover true poems. Now, I want to be the poem.
Mark Nepo
#88. I tried to speak your poems
but I could not!
The weeping of the gods
fell upon my ears.
Shiki Masaoka
#89. Then you are a poet?' she asked, fingering the flyer in her pocket.
'No not at all,' he waved his hand. 'I am merely a character in a poem.
Karen Tei Yamashita
#90. Once in a while i am struck
all over again... by just how blue
the sky appears .. on wind-played
autumn mornings, blue enough
to bruise a heart.
Sanober Khan
#91. Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
John Berger
#92. Making poems was a way of loving things, I had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning. But
Garth Greenwell
#94. It all has to do with art - writing, painting, things I've done for a long time but just never had enough time to pursue. I have poetry - things that are designed for songs, but they're always poems first.
Jason Newsted
#95. I'm much more capable of cutting back than of expanding. I've gotten very surgical about poems.
Joan Larkin
#96. In every one of these haunting and hungry poems, Howell draws a map for how to enter the heat and dew of the human being, naked and facing the natural world, desperate to feel. I did not realize while reading Render how deeply I was handing everything over.
Nikky Finney
#97. How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line - how would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined - well, a good poem.
Ashley Hay
#98. However, I began to submit poems to British magazines, and some were accepted. It was a great moment to see my first poems published. It felt like entering a tradition.
Helen Dunmore
#99. I wish I could write lyrical poems, but I just write the way they come.
Tom Paulin
#100. Some good, some so-so, and lots plain bad: that's how a book of poems is made, my Friend.
Martial
