#poetry

For me, poetry is a situation - a state of being, a way of facing life and facing history. ↗

— Tahar Ben Jelloun

#facing #history #life #me #poetry

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate. ↗

— John Denham

#evaporate #into #language #out #poetry

To know anything of a poet but his poetry is, so far as the poetry is concerned, to know something that may be entertaining, even delightful, but is certainly inessential. ↗

— John Drinkwater

#certainly #concerned #delightful #entertaining #even

The strings in her mind grew flatter, calmer. The shapes in the hologrid had changed. She heard the man's words, and yet she didn't; the words were not what was really important. And wasn't that right? Words had never been important, only strings, and the strings had shapes like - but not like -the ones around the man. Only the man had disappeared, too, and that was alright, because she, Miri, Miranda Serena Sharifi, was disappearing, was sliding down a steep long chute and each meter she traveled she became smaller and smaller until she had disappeared and was invisible, a weightless transparent ghost that neither twitched nor stammered, in the corner of a room she had never seen before. ↗

— Nancy Kress

#change

I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll. ↗

— Adrian Mitchell

#blues #hope #i #i love #jazz

I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future. ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#dreams

Everyone I have lost in the closing of a door the click of the lock is not forgotten, they do not die but remain within the soft edges of the earth, the ash of house fires and cancer in sin and forgiveness huddled under old blankets dreaming their way into my hands, my heart closing tight like fists. - "Indian Boy Love Song #1 ↗

— Sherman Alexie

#business

And it was at that age … poetry arrived in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don’t know how or when, no they were not voices, they were not words, nor silence, but from a street I was summoned, from the branches of night, abruptly from the others, among violent fires or returning alone. There I was without a face, and it touched me. I did not know what to say, my mouth had no way with names, my eyes were blind, and something started in my soul, fever or forgotten wings, and I made my own way, deciphering that fire, and I wrote the first faint line, faint, without substance, pure nonsense, pure wisdom of someone who knows nothing, and suddenly I saw the heavens unfastened and open, planets, palpitating plantations, shadow perforated, riddled with arrows, fire and flowers, the winding night, the universe. And I, infinitesimal being, drunk with the great starry void, likeness, image of mystery, felt myself a pure part of the abyss, I wheeled with the stars, my heart broke loose on the wind. ↗

— Pablo Neruda

#age

Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond— surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves. I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention. ↗

— Louise Glück

#age

Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three. ↗

— Philip Larkin

#letters-to-monica #philip-larkin #poem #poet #poetry