#poetry

The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it, it is because we have an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow or artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammering attempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual extravaganza, like Cyrano de Bergerac, speaking in rhyme, it is not our language disguised or distorted, but our language rounded and made whole. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#prose #song #speech #men

A picture in a book, a lynching. The bland faces of men who watch a Christ go up in flames, smiling, as if he were a hooked fish, a felled antelope, some wild thing tied to boards and burned. His charred body gives off light--a halo burns out of him. His face is scorched featureless; the hair matted to the scalp like feathers. One man stands with his hand on his hip, another with his arm slung over the shoulder of a friend, as if this moment were large enough to hold affection. ↗

— Toi Derricotte

#poetry #racism #violence #men

The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#poet #poetry #art

Anchor It took twenty horses to lug me through the shipyard on the back of a cart like a fifteen-and-a-half ton pantomime dame. My spitting image was weighed on the other side of the bow: two fat men in drag; we felt as though no-one could ever bring us down. ↗

— Natalie Scott

#poems #poetry #titanic #men

We love the imperfect shapes in nature and in the works of art, look for an intentional error as a sign of the golden key and sincerity found in true mastery. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#dejan-stojanovic #golden #golden-rule #imperfect #imperfection

Men and women who are lonely create. Those who are gregarious rarely do... Any poet would rather bed with a girl than write a poem about her. All art is the result of frustration. Art is energy deflected from its normal course in action. ↗

— Burton Rascoe

#creativity #poetry #art

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more ↗

— George Gordon Byron

#poetry #solitude #love

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted. ↗

— George Eliot

#poetry #music

If you must write prose or poems, the words you use should be your own. Don't plagiarize or take 'on loan'. There's always someone, somewhere, with a big nose, who knows, who'll trip you up and laugh when you fall. ↗

— Steven Morrissey

#poetry #music

I could do with a bit more excess. From now on I'm going to be immoderate--and volatile--I shall enjoy loud music and lurid poetry. I shall be rampant. ↗

— Joanne Harris

#music #poetry #rampant #volatile #music