I'm a poet. I distrust anything that starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop because people don't think in full, clear sentences. — Antjie Krog
My poetry is a game. My life is a game. But I am not a game. — Federico Garcia Lorca
I am gonna write poems til i die and when i have gotten outta this body i am gonna hang round in the wind and knock over everybody who got their feet on the ground. — Ntozake Shange
I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive. — Gregory Orr
To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment — Galway Kinnell
You don't necessarily have to write to be a poet. Some people work in gas stations and they're poets. I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist. — Bob Dylan
Poetic justice, poetic justice.. if I told you that a flower bloom in a dark room would you trust it. I mean I write poems in these songs. — Kendrick Lamar
I am a Woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal Woman,
that's me. — Maya Angelou
I start to think, and then I sink
Into the paper like I was ink
When I'm writing, I'm trapped in between the lines
I escape when I finish the rhyme. — Rakim
Short I Am A Poet Quotes
Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn. — Thomas Gray
The beauty of poetry is that the creation transcends the poet. — Mahatma Gandhi
Poetry is a sort of homecoming. — Paul Celan
Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing. — James Tate
I think that things are poetic when they don't have a boundary. Without rules. My life is poetic. — Mark Gonzales
I am an artist at living - my work of art is my life. — D.T. Suzuki
The true poem is the poet's mind. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet.
I Am Not A Poet Quotes
I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense conciliatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful. — Wilfred Owen
I express myself in sculpture since I am not a poet. — Aristide Maillol
I am a poet in deeds--not often in words. — Ian Fleming
If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.
I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet. — Tahar Ben Jelloun
You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It’s only that. — Edna St. Vincent Millay
But you have to understand that I consider myself a very modest artist, or whatever, and not of importance really at all - it is quite embarrassing to me to be asked my opinion about things. I am only a wee Scottish poet on the outside of everything. — Ian Hamilton Finlay
A poet's job is to find a name for everything: to be a fearless finder of the names of things.
I always was a rebel...but on the other hand, I wanted to be loved and accepted...and not just be a loudmouth, lunatic, poet, musician. But I cannot be what I am not. — John Lennon
My child, you have a flawed grasp of the nature of myth-making. I am a poet and storyteller, a creator of ballads and sagas. Pray do not confuse the exercise of the imagination with mere mendacity. I am a master of the mysteries of words, their meanings and music and mellifluous magic. — Frances Hardinge
When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich. — Maya Angelou
Sometimes I feel as if I am read before I write. When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol for Palestine. But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother. She's not a symbol. — Mahmoud Darwish
What Is A Poet Quotes
Black is not sad. Bright colours are what depress me. They're so... empty. Black is poetic. How do you imagine a poet? In a bright yellow jacket? Probably not. — Ann Demeulemeester
My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all. — John Lennon
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. — T. S. Eliot
Poets talk about "spots of time", but it is really the fishermen who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone. — Norman Maclean
Pure poetry in motion. A swift-moving, heartfelt tale of love and loss, two stories intersecting-an d connecting-by magic. Michelle Baker is a born poet, and a born writer. The Canoe is just the start of what I hope to be a long idyllic journey through the love and soul of the human heart. — Trent Zelazny
But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright. — Beth Henley
Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create. — Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop? — William Stafford
There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast! — Jean De La Bruyere
What To Say To A Poet Quotes
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/ Who says my hand a needle better fits./ A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong/ For such despite they cast on female wits;/ If what I do prove well, it won't advance,/ They'll say it's stolen, or else, it was by chance. — Anne Bradstreet
The poem that comes closest to saying what I think is the one in Human Wishes called "Rusia en 1931." This poem is about [Osip] Mandelstam, who was a great poet and an anti-Stalinist, and [Cesar] Vallejo, who was a great poet and a Stalinist. — Robert Hass
Perhaps there is a degree of perception at which what is real and what is imagines are one: a state of clairvoyant observation, accessible or possibly accessible to the poet or, say, the acutest poet. — Wallace Stevens
The scarily brilliant Romantic poet and visionary William Blake dared to say what many of us have perhaps thought but kept to ourselves: “A good local pub has much in common with a church, except that a pub is warmer, and there’s more conversation. — Brian D. McLaren
I say sometimes that I'm a poet but I work in the novel form. That's what I do. That's what makes sense to me. I think of myself as someone who makes particular interventions into genres that already exist. — Douglas A. Martin
Just as a poet often has license from the rules of grammar and pronunciation, we should like to ask for 'physicists' license from the rules of mathematics in order to express what we wish to say in as simple a manner as possible. — Richard P. Feynman
I had to learn quick, because I was performing in Cinco de Mayo festivals with babies crying and people lifting their beers, and you know the feather dancers would come, and they'd say, "What are you, a poet? You're next". — Sandra Cisneros
The poet is a creator, not an iconoclast, and never will tamely endeavor to say in prose what can only be expressed in song. — Edmund Clarence Stedman
The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes. — George Eliot
Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes. — C. S. Lewis
Are Quotes
One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours? I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life. — Kahlil Gibran
A true friend is someone who thinks that you are a good egg even though he knows that you are slightly cracked. — Bernard Meltzer
Always remember you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, smarter than you think and twice as beautiful as you'd ever imagined. Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself — Rumi
Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom. — Charles Spurgeon
Candidates With Deeply Held Christian Beliefs Are Unfit and Disqualified From Serving As A Federal Judge. — Charles Schumer
If I could take your troubles
I would toss them into the sea,
But all these things I'm finding
Are impossible for me.
I cannot build a mountain
Or catch a rainbow fair,
But let me be what I know best,
A friend that is always there. — Kahlil Gibran
Do you know what you are? You are a manuscript oƒ a divine letter. You are a mirror reflecting a noble face. This universe is not outside of you. Look inside yourself; everything that you want, you are already that. — Rumi
With the wild nature as ally and teacher we see not through two eyes but through the many eyes of intuition. With intuition we are like the starry night, we gaze at the world through a thousand eyes. The wild woman is fluent in the language of dreams, images, passion, and poetry. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead. The consciousness of loving and being loved brings a warmth and a richness to life that nothing else can bring. — Oscar Wilde
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. — William Wordsworth
The small man builds cages for everyone he knows While the sage, who has to duck his head when the moon is low, Keeps dropping keys all night long For the beautiful rowdy prisoners. — Hafez
Love in the Arab world is like a prisoner, and I want to set (it) free. I want to free the Arab soul, sense and body with my poetry. The relationships between men and women in our society are not healthy. — Nizar Qabbani
The truth is... everything counts. Everything. Everything we do and everything we say. Everything helps or hurts; everything adds to or takes away from someone else. — Countee Cullen
What is Music? How do you define it? Music is a calm moonlit night, the rustle of leaves in Summer. Music is the far off peal of bells at dusk! Music comes straight from the heart and talks only to the heart: it is Love! Music is the Sister of Poetry and her Mother is sorrow! — Sergei Rachmaninoff
Real poetry, is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it. — Matsuo Basho
What Is Poetry Quotes
Carpe diem! Rejoice while you are alive; enjoy the day; live life to the fullest; make the most of what you have. It is later than you think. — Horace
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does. — Allen Ginsberg
Great poetry is always written by somebody straining to go beyond what he can do. — Stephen Spender
Love itself is what is left over when being "in love" has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. — Louis de Bernieres
What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe — James Dickey
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. — T. S. Eliot
Poetry challenges you. Much of its importance is that it's one of the few places left in culture that makes things difficult-it asks you to think, to perceive and not to take for granted what we think about the world. — Dan Beachy-Quick
I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you. — Joseph Campbell
Writing Poetry Quotes
At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music. — Satyajit Ray
When you write a song, most of the words you use are in black and white, and then, from time to time, you use one that’s in color. These words in color are a part of ourselves, because we give them a meaning. If you like, we give them a third dimension. — Jacques Brel
Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency. — Gilles Deleuze
Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. — Carl Sandburg
A poem is never finished, only abandoned. — Paul Valery
It was commonplace for colleagues to write comic poetry to each other, predicting the manner in which they might die. — Oliver Burkeman
The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in. — Dylan Thomas
I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky. — Sharon Olds
Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon. — Linton Kwesi Johnson
Sometimes I wish I was poetic and subtle. I write very bold and blunt and tell it like it is. — Pink
Writing Poems Quotes
I’d cut my soul into a million different pieces just to form a constellation to light your way home. I’d write love poems to the parts of yourself you can’t stand. I’d stand in the shadows of your heart and tell you I’m not afraid of your dark. — Andrea Gibson
It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power. — Raymond Carver
You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems, and suffer, and understand, for all that is life. — Jiddu Krishnamurti
Your eyelashes will write on my heart the poem that could never come from the pen of a poet. — Rumi
Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem. — Paul Celan
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems. — Wislawa Szymborska
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering. — Robert Frost
The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation. — James Fenton
As you continue writing and rewriting, you begin to see possibilities you hadn't seen before. Writing a poem is always a process of discovery. — Robert Hayden
When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy. — Matsuo Basho
I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech with such art as to produce effects of light and shade, for I am no painter. Even by signs and gestures I cannot express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by means of sounds, for I am a musician. — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
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
The young artist of today need no longer say 'I am a painter,' or 'a poet,' or 'a dancer.' He is simply an 'artist.' All of life will be open to him. — Allan Kaprow
I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box. — Anne Sexton
I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. — Daphne Du Maurier
Poets use metaphors and symbolism to construct images. I construct my images in the same way, except that I am using a different form. — Shirin Neshat
I am a great admirer of Robert Vavra and love his beautiful photographs and books. He is a wonderful artist, a poet. — Leni Riefenstahl
In Lithuania, I am known as a poet, and they don’t care about my cinema. In Europe they don’t know my poetry; in Europe, I am a filmmaker. But here, in the United States, I am only a maverick! — Jonas Mekas
I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible. — Audre Lorde
Each of us has a very rich nature and can look at things objectively, from a distance, and at the same time can have something more personal to say about them. I am trying to look at the world, and at myself, from many different points of view. I think many poets have this duality. — Wislawa Szymborska
I am hopelessly divided between the dark and the good, the rebel and the saint, the sex maniac and the monk, the poet and the priest, the demagogue and the populist. Pen to paper, I put it all down - I'm out on a limb here, so watch my back. — Billy Idol
I am what libraries and librarians have made me, with little assistance from a professor of Greek and poets — Heraclitus
The way something looks or sounds is also what it means. Words as visual and aural phenomena, which mainly poets, not critics and prose writers, tend to be obsessed with. I think maybe I'm more of a curator than I am a writer in the strict sense because I am interested in how everything on the page, in a space, works together. — Masha Tupitsyn
A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet. — Bob Dylan
I am very sure that any man of common understanding may, by culture, care, attention, and labor, make himself what- ever he pleases, except a great poet. — Lord Chesterfield
There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory. — Philip Levine
At present, I am a poet trying to be a soldier. To tell the truth, I am not interested in writing nowadays, except in so far as writing is the expression of something beautiful ... The only sort of book I care to write about the war is the sort people will read after the war is over - a century after it is over. — Joyce Kilmer
To me the poets are closer than I am to the idea of voice, to a sort of primeval song that we all participate in. — Francesco Clemente
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
LSD, yeah, the big parade – everybody's doin' it now. Take LSD, then you are a poet, an intellectual. What a sick mob. I am building a machine gun in my closet now to take out as many of them as I can before they get me. — Charles Bukowski
Now begins to rise in me the familiar rhythm; words that have lain dormant now lift, now toss their crests, and fall and rise, and falls again. I am a poet, yes. Surely I am a great poet. — Virginia Woolf
I have no connections here; only gusty collisions,
rootless seedlings forced into bloom, that collapse.
...
I am the Visiting Poet: a real unicorn,
a wind-up plush dodo, a wax museum of the Movement.
People want to push the buttons and see me glow. — Marge Piercy
I am one of those who hold that poetry is never so blithe as in a wanton and irregular subject. — Michel de Montaigne
I am particularly conscious of my connection to the poets of the Harlem Renaissance because I, too, am a Black poet, born into, and shaped by, the very community in which those poets of the past produced so much of the work we associate with the Harlem Renaissance. We speak from the same place, both literally and metaphorically. — Nikki Grimes
Any place you love is the world to you”, explained the pensive Catherine Wheel, who had been attached to an old deal box in early life, and prided herself on her broken heart; “but love is not fashionable any more, the poets have killed it. They wrote so much about that nobody believed them, and I am not surprised. True love suffers, and is silent. I remember myself once- But it is no matter now. Romance is a thing of the past. — Oscar Wilde
Dont teach my boy poetry, an English mother recently wrote the Provost of Harrow. Dont teach my boy poetry; he is going to stand for Parliament. Well, perhaps she was rightbut if more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place to live on this Commencement Day of 1956. — John F. Kennedy
One lesson we can learn from pre-industrial peoples is the power of storytelling. I am struck by how important storytelling is among tribal peoples; it forms the basis of their educational systems. The Celtic peoples, for example, insisted that only the poets could be teachers. Why? I think it is because knowledge that is not passed through the heart is dangerous: it may lack wisdom; it may be a power trip; it may squelch life out of the learners. What if our educational systems were to insist that teachers be poets and storytellers and artists? What transformations would follow? — Matthew Fox
I am not quite a poet but I am something of the kind. — Edmund Wilson
I know some people might think it odd - unworthy even - for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people's poet so I write for the people. — Maya Angelou
I personally believe the role of poets as poets (which is something different from our obligations as citizens, community members, humans) is to write poems. I believe this because I am quite sure poetry can do something no other form or writing, or human activity, can, at least not in such a powerful and distilled and undeniable way. And that we need this type of thinking for our survival as individuals and as a species. — Matthew Zapruder
My poems are certainly in the lyric tradition, but perhaps a reader can tell me more precisely who I am as a poet. How can I be so old and not know? I have always been deeply grateful for the urge to write, the desire to create, that's certain. Writing has always been the way I make sense of life. Perhaps my poems define me, rather than the other way around. They do constantly surprise me. — Connie Wanek
I am a poet, bard, scop, minnesinger, trobairitz who is driven by sound and the possibilities for vocal expression, the mouthing of text as well as intentionality or dance on the page. — Anne Waldman
I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud. — Adrienne Rich
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