Poetry Quotes - page 95
...There is no such a thing as an old poet. People are younger and older, chronologically, because of math of calendars, but spirits are young and old simultaneously. Poetry as a professional, life-long pursuit is one that offers wisdom with age, and that's to be respected...
Jesús Papoleto Meléndez
It may be dismissed, on the one hand, as a commonplace aesthetic satisfaction: and, on the other hand, if we say that the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even if the supreme poetic idea, and that our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called, even if poetry that involves us vitally, the feeling of deliverance, of a release, of a perfection touched, of a vocation so that all men may know the truth and that the truth may set them free - if we say these things and if we are able to see the poet who achieved God and placed Him in His seat in heaven in all His glory, the poet himself, still in the ecstasy of the poem that completely accomplished its purpose, would have seemed, whether young or old, whether in rags or ceremonial robe, a man who needed what he had created, uttering the hymns of joy that followed his creation. This may be a gross exaggeration of a very simple matter. But perhaps the same is true of many of the more prodigious things of life and death.
Wallace Stevens
If poetry isn't understanding all, the whole word, then it isn't worth anything. Young poets forget that poetry must include the mind as well as the emotions. Too many poets delude themselves by thinking the mind is dangerous and must be left out. Well, the mind is dangerous and must be left in.
Robert Frost
I did not know that the rules about these things were different if you were female. I did not know that "poetess" was an insult, and that I myself would some day be called one. I did not know that to be told I had transcended my gender would be considered a compliment. I didn't know - yet - that black was compulsory. All of that was in the future. When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me - yet - the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.
Margaret Atwood
All intelligent persons also possess some larger-scale frame-systems whose members seemed at first impossibly different - like water with electricity, or poetry with music. Yet many such analogies - along with the knowledge of how to apply them - are among our most powerful tools of thought. They explain our ability sometimes to see one thing - or idea - as though it were another, and thus to apply knowledge and experience gathered in one domain to solve problems in another. It is thus that we transfer knowledge via the paradigms of Science. We learn to see gases and fluids as particles, particles as waves, and waves as envelopes of growing spheres.
Marvin Minsky
I remember sitting in a lecture hall in a college in Hyderabad in front of an audience of five or six hundred students. On my left, chairing the event, was the vice-chancellor of the university. On my right, a professor of poetry. The vice-chancellor whispered in my ear, "You shouldn't spend any more time on fiction. Your political writing is the thing to concentrate on.” The professor of poetry whispered, "When will you get back to writing fiction? That is your true calling. This other stuff you do is just ephemeral.”... Sitting between the two professors, I enjoyed their contradictory advice.
Arundhati Roy
I made up a lot of instant barbarian folklore-I told 'em a Vor prides himself on self-control, that it's not considered polite on Barrayar for a man to, you know, before his lady has. Three times. It was considered insulting to her. I stroked, I rubbed, I scratched, I recited poetry, I nuzzled and nibbled and-cripes, my fingers are cramped.” His speech was a bit slurred, too, Miles noticed. "I thought they'd never fall asleep.” Ivan paused; a slow smirk displaced the snarl on his face. "But they were smiling, when they finally did.
Lois McMaster Bujold
If you put it as "complex nervous systems” it sounds pretty deflationary. What's so special about a complex nervous system? But of course, that complex nervous system allows you to do calculus. It allows you to do astrophysics... to write poetry... to fall in love. Put under that description, when asked "What's so special about humans...?”, I'm at a loss to know how to answer that question. If you don't see why we'd be special... because we can do poetry [and] think philosophical thoughts [and] we can think about the morality of our behavior, I'm not sure what kind of answer could possibly satisfy you at that point.
...I could pose the same kinds of questions of you... So God says, "You are guys are really, really special.” How does his saying it make us special? "But you see, he gave us a soul.” How does our having a soul make us special? Whatever answer you give, you could always say... "What's so special about that?”.
Shelly Kagan
Why should a poet pray thus? poets scorn
The boundaried love of country, being free
Of winds, and alien lands, and distances,
Vagabonds of the compass, wayfarers,
Pilgrims of thought, the tongues of Pentecost
Their privilege, and in the peddler's pack
The curious treasures of their stock-in-trade,
Bossy and singular, the heritage
Of poetry and science, polished bright,
Thin with the rubbing of too many hands;
Myth, glamour, hazard, fables dim as age,
Faith, doubt, perplexity, grief, hope, despair,
Wings, and great waters, and Promethean fire,
Man's hand to clasp, and Helen's mouth to kiss.
Why then in little meadows hedge about
A poet's pasture? shed a poet's cloak
For fustian? cede a birthright, thus to map
So small a corner of so great a world?
Vita Sackville-West
«Nevertheless it is about themes endowed with depth, rather uncomfortable in a culture that often seeks from poetry almost a consolation or at least a reconciliation with the world. Davinio's poetry is instead problematic, not at all conciliatory or reconciled. Caterina develops her themes in a vibrant language, dry and almost essential, taut and antirhetorical» (Gianmario Lucini)
Caterina Davinio
Reproduction, Nerissa thought: Ethan had once called it the blade of evolution. There was no intelligence in evolution, only the cutting-board logic of selective reproduction. She envisioned the work of evolution as a kind of blind, inarticulate poetry. We are the was it Charles Darwin had said? From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved...There is grandeur in this view of life.
Grandeur or horror. The idea that all the kaleidoscopic strangeness of biological systems could unfold without guidance or motivation was almost too unsettling to accept.
Robert Charles Wilson
I'm both a poet and one of the "everybodies" of my country. I live with manipulated fear, ignorance, cultural confusion and social antagonism huddling together on the faultline of an empire. I hope never to idealise poetry - it has suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry, anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong. There is room, indeed necessity, for both Neruda and César Valléjo, for Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alfonsina Storni, for both Ezra Pound and Nelly Sachs. Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple. And there are colonised poetics and resilient poetics, transmissions across frontiers not easily traced.
Adrienne Rich
I feel enormous joy and exhilaration. This is so different from the poetry world into which I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s. That was a world dominated by a few major figures, mostly from a certain class and of course male: Pound, Williams, Eliot, Stevens. I was saying to a young man, a poet working here, "Your generation doesn't have to look at the field of poetry as a hierarchy. You can draw from this enormously rich cluster of poetries, and you can enrich yourself from so many kinds that this is a wholly different situation than we had in the 1940s and 1950s."
Adrienne Rich
A sense of community seems to arise out of the word. Well, that's true. I believe that. I think that's one of the reasons that communities of poetry, and I don't just mean communities of poets, but everywhere in this country communities of poetry-of people reading poetry, listening to poetry, coming together around poetry-are becoming so widespread. It's as if this gathering around the word occurs in response to worsening conditions.
Adrienne Rich
