Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Poetry is mostly hunches.
Silly girls your heads full of boys
until only infinity remained of beauty
Each servant stamps the reader with a look.
Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
Will occur as time grows more open about it.
The winter does what it can for its children.
The facts of history have been too well rehearsed.
Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
The gray glaze of the past attacks all know-how...
I lost my ridiculous accent without acquiring another
I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.
A yak is a prehistoric cabbage; of that, we can be sure.
What is the past, what is it all for? A mental sandwich?
Not until it starts to stink does the inevitable happen.
Things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision
The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot be.
Expecting rain, the profile of a day Wears its soul like a hat.
I always thought that writing poetry was in itself a political act.
The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through.
I am often asked why I write, and I don't know really--I just want to.
And so we turn the page over. To think of starting. This is all there is.
In the evening Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is.
I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream.
I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places.
I write with experiences in mind, but I don't write about them, I write out of them.
All beauty, resonance, integrity, Exist by deprivation or logic Of strange position.
Once you've lived in France, you don't want to live anywhere else, including France.
To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps To some reader a latticework of regrets.
It is written in the Book of Usable Minutes That all things have their center in their dying.
Much that is beautiful must be discarded So that we may resemble a taller Impression of ourselves.
Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you, At incredible speed, traveling day and night.
Just when I thought there wasn't room enough for another thought in my head, I had this great idea—
Once a happy old man One can never change the core of things, and light burns you the harder for it.
This whole moment is the groin Of a borborygmic giant who even now Is rolling over on us in his sleep.
You stupefied me. We waxed, Carnivores, late and alight In the beaded winter. All was ominous, luminous.
A perfect example of the new republic's urge to drape itself with the togas of classical respectability.
Reading is a pleasure, but to finish reading, to come to the blank space at the end, is also a pleasure.
There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army.
I want a bedroom near the sky, an astrologer's cave Where I can fashion eclogues that are chaste and grave.
Death is a new office building filled with modern furniture, A wise thing, but which has no purpose for us.
The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
In the increasingly convincing darkness The words become palpable, like a fruit That is too beautiful to eat.
The soul establishes itself. But how far can it swim out through the eyes And still return safely to its nest?
Part of the strength of Pollock and Rothko's art, in fact, is this doubt as to whether art may be there at all.
I don't want to read what is going to slide down easily; there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience.
The soul is not a soul, Has no secret, is small, and it fits Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.
I don't look on poetry as closed works. I feel they're going on all the time in my head and I occasionally snip off a length.
Life is beautiful. He who reads that As in the window of some distant, speeding train Knows what he wants, and what will befall.
I'm heading for a clean-named place like Wisconsin, and mad as a jack-o'-lantern, will get there without help and nosy proclivities.