04/30/08

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. -Dylan Thomas

04/29/08

We are all being sauteed in the sautee dish of life. -Robert Hass

04/28/08

Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me. - Sigmund Freud

04/25/08

Our language, or any civilised language, is like the phoenix: it springs anew from its own ashes. -T.S. Eliot

04/24/08

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day. -Robert Hass

04/23/08

Words have no language which can utter the secrets of love; and beyond the limits of expression is the expounding of desire. -Hafiz

04/22/08

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated. -Lucille Clifton

04/21/08

Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated—thrown aside—a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions. -William Carlos Williams

04/18/08

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. -Percy Bysshe Shelley

04/17/08

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art. -Thomas Hardy

04/14/08

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

04/11/08

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular. -Aristotle

04/10/08

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own. -Salvatore Quasimodo

04/09/08

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. -Carl Sandburg

04/08/08

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language. -Lucille Clifton

04/07/08

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. -Rita Dove

4/04/08

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. -Paul Engle

04/03/08

The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly. -Ogden Nash

04/02/08

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices, but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence and fulfills the duty to express the results of his thought in clear form. -Albert Einstein

04/01/08

Whether or not you write well, write bravely. -Bill Stout