Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams.

Drum on your drums, batter on your banjos, sob on the long cool winding saxophones. Go to it, O jazzmen.

Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish.

Freedom is baffling: men having it often know not they have it till it is gone and they no longer have it.

The sea speaks a language polite people never repeat. It is a colossal scavenger slang and has no respect.

Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches.

I glory in this world of men and women, torn with troubles, yet living on to love and laugh through it all.

Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny.

Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night.

out of great Russia came three dusky syllables workmen took guns and went out to die for: Bread, Peace, Land.

Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets.

What if someone gave a war & Nobody came? / Life would ring the bells of Ecstasy and Forever be Itself again.

I had been keeping an off eye on the advertising field, thinking I might become an idea man and a copywriter.

There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.

Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower.

Yesterday and tomorrow cross and mix on the skyline. The two are lost in a purple haze. One forgets, one waits.

My first stringed instrument was a cigar box banjo where I cut and turned the pegs and strung the wires myself.

Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen.

I am the people the mob the crowd the mass. Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work. I am the grass. I cover all.

The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over the harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.

We read Robert Browning's poetry. Here we needed no guidance from the professor: the poems themselves were enough.

Shame is the feeling you have when you agree with the woman who loves you that you are the man she thinks you are.

Arithmetic is numbers you squeeze from your head to your hand to your pencil to your paper till you get the answer.

There are some people who can receive a truth by no other way than to have their understanding shocked and insulted.

The wind bit hard at Valley Forge one Christmas. Soldiers tied rags on their feet. Red footprints wrote on the snow...

There is a wolf in me... - I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.

Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters.

I been a wanderin' Early and late, New York City To the Golden Gate An' it looks like I'm never gonna cease my Wanderin'.

You remember some bedrooms you have slept in. There are bedrooms you like to remember and others you would like to forget.

Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during the moment.

Often I look back and see that I had been many kinds of a fool-and that I had been happy in being this or that kind of fool.

The peace of great books be for you, Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages, Bleach of the light of years held in leather.

Corn wind in the fall, come off the black lands, come off the whisper of the silk hangers, the lap of the flat spear leaves.

The more rhymethere isin poetry the more dangerof its tricking the writer into something other than the urge in the beginning.

Such a Big miracle in such a tiny baby. Big things often have small beginnings A baby is God's opinion that life should go on.

All politicians should have 3 hats - one to throw into the ring, one to talk through, and one to pull rabbits out of if elected.

The single clenched fist lifted and ready, Or the open asking hand held out and waiting. Choose: For we meet by one or the other.

I remember in my early 20s when I felt I couldn't live past 30. I was learning how to write. I had a lot of hard work ahead of me.

Every blunder behind us is giving a cheer for us, and only for those who were willing to fail are the dangers and splendors of life.

Poetry is a puppet-show, where riders of skyrockets and divers of sea fathoms gossip about the sixth sense and the fourth dimension.

Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today. Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction. See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.

Tongues wrangled dark at a man. He buttoned his overcoat and stood alone. In a snowstorm, red hollyberries, thoughts, he stood alone.

I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago.

Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, 'Listen!' and 'Did you see it?' 'Did you hear it? What was it?'

My room for books and study or for sitting and thinking about nothing in particular to see what would happen was at the end of a hall.

And those who say, "I'll try anything once," often try nothing twice, three times, arriving late at the gate of dreams worth dying for.

Poetry is a section of river-fog and moving boat-lights, delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, 'Oh!' and another, 'How?'

It is necessary ... for a man to go away by himself ... to sit on a rock ... and ask, 'Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going?

There have been as many varieties of socialists as there are wild birds that fly in the woods and sometimes go up and on through the clouds.

Share This Page