#poems

The world is a wide place where we stumble like children learning to walk. The world is a bright mosaic where we learn like children to see, where our little blurry eyes strive greedily to take in as much light and love and colour and detail as they can. The world is a coaxing whisper when the wind lips the trees, when the sea licks the shore, when animals burrow into earth and people look up at the sympathetic stars. The world is an admonishing roar when gales chase rainclouds over the plains and whip up ocean waves, when people crowd into cities or intrude into dazzling jungles. What right have we to carry our desperate mouths up mountains or into deserts? Do we want to taste rock and sand or do we expect to make impossible poems from space and silence? The vastness at least reminds us how tiny we are, and how much we don't yet understand. We are mere babes in the universe, all brothers and sisters in the nursery together. We had better learn to play nicely before we're allowed out..... And we want to go out, don't we? ..... Into the distant humming welcoming darkness. ↗

— Jay Woodman

#babes #brothers #children #cities #colour

She winced and covered her ears as Eric,onstage, wrestled with his microphone. "Sorry about that, guys!" he yelled. "All right. I'm Eric, and this is my homeboy Matt on the drums. My first poem is called 'Untitled.'" He screwed up his face as if in pain, and wailed into the mike. "Come my faux juggernaut, my nefarious loins! Slather every protuberance with arid zeal!" Simon slid down in his seat. "Please don't tell anyone I know him." Clary giggled. "Who uses the word 'loins'?" "Eric," Simon said grimly. "All his poems have loins in them." 'Turgid is my torment!" Eric wailed. "Agony swells within!" "You bet it does," Clary said. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#eric #hilarious #poems #poetry-critic #simon-lewis

The poets, therefore, however much they adorned the gods in their poems, and amplified their exploits with the highest praises, yet very frequently confess that all things are held together and governed by one spirit or mind. ↗

— Lactantius

#all things #amplified #confess #exploits #frequently

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems. ↗

— Jim Harrison

#first #got #i #magazine #nation

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done. ↗

— Thomas Lynch

#done #entirely #gets #i #ignored

Many of my poems are not sexual. ↗

— Thom Gunn

#poems #sexual

I liked the kid who wrote me that he had to do a term paper on a modern poet and he was doing me because, though they say you have to read poems twice, he found he could handle mine in one try. ↗

— Howard Nemerov

#could #doing #found #had #handle

I booked my first studio at like 12 or 13. Somewhere in that season of my life, singing along with the radio became me wanting to be on radio, you know. And writing Langston Hughes replica poems became me wanting to write like Stevie Wonder. ↗

— Frank Ocean

#became #booked #first #hughes #i

My poems - I don't even like the sound of that, in a way. Not that anyone else wrote them. But we know that only people who are really close to us care about our personal experience. ↗

— Sharon Olds

#anyone #care #close #else #even

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures. ↗

— Jack Prelutsky

#accompany #after #came #creatures #decided