04/30/09

A poet uses words not to explain something, and not to describe something, but to make something. Poet means “maker.” Poetry is not the language of objective explanation but the language of imagination. It makes an image of reality in such a way as to invite our participation in it. We do not have more information after we read a poem, we have more experience. It is not an examination of what happens, but an immersion in what happens. -Eugene H. Peterson

04/29/09

To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. -Mary Oliver

04/28/09

Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is. -Amiri Baraka

04/27/09

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers. -Gwendolyn Brooks

04/24/09

Considering the ways in which so many of us waste our time, what would be wrong with a world in which everybody were writing poems? After all, there’s a significant service to humanity in spending time doing no harm. While you’re writing your poem, there’s one less scoundrel in the world. And I’d like a world, wouldn’t you, in which people actually took time to think about what they were saying? It would be, I’m certain, a more peaceful, more reasonable place. I don’t think there could ever be too many poets. By writing poetry, even those poems that fail and fail miserably, we honor and affirm life. We say ‘We loved the earth but could not stay." -Ted Kooser

04/23/09

I'd rather be a great bad poet than a good bad poet. -Ogden Nash

04/22/09

The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it. -Wendell Berry

04/21/09

Times change and forms and their meanings alter. Thus new poems are necessary. Their forms must be discovered in the living language of their day, or old forms, embodying exploded concepts, will tyrannize over the imagination. -William Carlos Williams

04/20/09

Poems are transmissions from the depths of whoever wrote them to the depths of the reader. To a greater extent than with any other kind of reading, the reader of a poem is making that poem, is inhabiting those words in the most personal sort of way. That doesn’t mean that you read a poem and make it whatever you want it to be, but that it’s operating so deeply in you, that it is the most special kind of reading. -Kay Ryan

04/17/09

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought. -Matsuo Basho

04/16/09

Then I decided to draw from and on my own imagination, and everything came out perfect. -Jack Prelutsky

04/15/09

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it. -Rainer Maria Rilke

04/14/09

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time. -Robert Hass

04/13/09

I really don't think life is about the I-could-have-beens. Life is only about the I-tried-to-do. I don't mind the failure but I can't imagine that I'd forgive myself if I didn't try. -Nikki Giovanni

04/10/09

Let us enrich ourselves with our mutual differences. -Paul Valery

04/09/09

One of the ridiculous aspects of being a poet is the huge gulf between how seriously we take ourselves and how generally we are ignored by everybody else. -Billy Collins

04/08/09

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. -Robert Frost

04/07/09

I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was Man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying? -Jalaluddin Rumi

04/06/09

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

04/03/09

Nothing which does not transport is poetry. -Joseph Joubert

04/02/09

I'm not interested in poetry that keeps people out; I'm interested in poetry that invites people in. -Naomi Shihab Nye

04/01/09

Many people like to think that they'll find balance AFTER they find success. But in reality, achieving balance IS success. -Brian Koslow