#try

Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs. ↗

— W.H. Auden

#poetry #prosody #dreams

There seems to be no unexpressed self in animals, as if they are as fully themselves in flesh as possible, with no lag of consciousness to fill up, while we keep trying to grow into something else. ↗

— Jane Roberts

#poetry #seth #dreams

If you wish to know me, just ask. ↗

— Susie Clevenger

#dreams

SPRING POEM It is spring, my decision, the earth ferments like rising bread or refuse, we are burning last year's weeds, the smoke flares from the road, the clumped stalks glow like sluggish phoenixes / it wasn't only my fault / birdsongs burst from the feathered pods of their bodies, dandelions whirl their blades upwards, from beneath this decaying board a snake sidewinds, chained hide smelling of reptile sex / the hens roll in the dust, squinting with bliss, frogbodies bloat like bladders, contract, string the pond with living jelly eyes, can I be this ruthless? I plunge my hands and arms into the dirt, swim among stones and cutworms, come up rank as a fox, restless. Nights, while seedlings dig near my head I dream of reconciliations with those I have hurt unbearably, we move still touching over the greening fields, the future wounds folded like seeds in our tender fingers, days I go for vicious walks past the charred roadbed over the bashed stubble admiring the view, avoiding those I have not hurt yet, apocalypse coiled in my tongue, it is spring, I am searching for the word: finished finished so I can begin over again, some year I will take this word too far. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#dreams

Carry out your literary dream, no matter how unlikely it may seem... ↗

— Terry A O'Neal

#poetry #quote #terry #dreams

I do eat well. I try to love my body. That is what I tell my daughter. I say, 'Love every bite of food. Love your body. We're all going to be dead soon.' Actually I don't say that last thing to her. ↗

— Helen Hunt

#bite #body #daughter #dead #eat

In an Artist’s Studio One face looks out from all his canvases, One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans: We found her hidden just behind those screens, That mirror gave back all her loveliness. A queen in opal or in ruby dress, A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens, A saint, an angel—every canvas means The same one meaning, neither more nor less. He feeds upon her face by day and night, And she with true kind eyes looks back on him, Fair as the moon and joyful as the light: Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim; Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright; Not as she is, but as she fills his dream. ↗

— Christina Rossetti

#dreams

Lies belong in poems ↗

— Kenneth Koch

#dreams

if you’re going to use the word ‘dream’ in a poem, you had better be langston hughes. ↗

— Jewelle Gomez

#poetry #dreams

A snake bites your ankle. Recoiling, you scream. Fearing poison, your mind slips into a dream... ...where a man bites your ankle. Expecting no guile, "Again," softly falls from your lips with a smile. Yet, the man and the snake are the same. Your perception is only to blame. ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#judgement #perception #poetry #richelle #richelle-goodrich