… and I realise the only way to tell the others is through the way my voice can take these broken wordsand turn it into music. Turn it into poetry.And I sing to make myself...

We choose exile as a vantage point; from exile we look back on the rejected

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing.

Poetry is another name for a person’s telling of the self, existence and what is beyond, and one’s own perceptions.

The Best Thing I love about being a writer and a poet is, I can make up my own words to fit my imagination.

I am the constellation of my own.

At one time I was weary of verse writing, and wanted to give it up. At another time I was determined to be a poet until I could establish a proud name over others. The...

I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his outbursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat...

When confronted with suffering that won’t go away or with even a minor problem, we instinctively focus on what is missing,…not on the Master’s hand. Often when you think everything has gone wrong, it’s just...

If you opened the dictionary and searched for the meaning of a Goddess, you would find the reflection of a dancing lady.

To my way of thinking the function of the poet is to make us aware of what we know and don’t know we know.

Past and future monopolize the poet’s sensory and intellectual faculties, detached from the immediate spectacle. These two philtres become utterly clear the moment one stops being hypnotized by the cloudy precipitate constituted by the world...

How are his poems?””He’s not as good as he thinks he is, but then most of us feel that way.

Frequent friction when love becomes political.

The trouble with poetry is it’s often written to the sound of a drum only the poet may hear; nonetheless, blessed are those poets who always manage to find unshakeable pleasure in their own works.

My heart’s scripture tastes foreign in the mouths of cowards and on the tongues of those who have never breathed inthe moon and breathed out the world.

That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face – that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem.

Live for everything, or die for nothing

it was dawning on me how uphill a poet’s path was, and I confessed to her that if I had to be the choice between being happy or being a poet, I’d choose to be...

…I guess you’re right – I am a priest – I offer sacrifices – so take this line, I want you to have something of mine…

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

Fate would never permit happiness to a man of such talent-a content poet is a mediocre one, a happy poet is insufferable.

The ancients wrote down the first scripture of choreography by observing in the night sky movements of the dancing stars.

[poems are] crystals deposited after the effervescent contact of the spirit with reality.(cristaux deposes apres l’effervescent contact de l’esprit avec la realite)

The pure and poorly adapted one who crashed against the world of fakes and cheats.

The poet is a Cyclops in the Kingdom of the Blind whose sole cure for the madness of his vision must be starvation.

Early in her career, Muse engaged her skills for technical purposes, such as document translation and schematic visualizations for government entities. She continued to write and paint poetically, in secret, using her pen name, Muse....

A poem for Beth: Roses are red, Violets are blue, I didn’t know what love meant, until I looked it up in the dictionary.

It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a...

The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.

ink marks the page/where you execute your will like a doe announcing an/ox-stern mate with a single, bleary blink.

Poetry is inspired by the elements of random thoughts, an overflow of gazing at the unseen.

A poet is simply an artist whose medium is human emotions. A poet chisels away at our own sensibilities, shaping our vision while molding our hearts. A poet wraps words around our own feelings and...

It seems to me that the poet has only to perceive that which others do not perceive, to look deeper than others look. And the mathematician must do the same thing.

Give the mind rest, do not stress too much on thoughts, close your eyes and let your spirit dance.

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

Every poet — every storyteller — requires motivation.

The beauty of words will forever be stronger than the silence of tears.

My writing, it’s my way of making sense of everything. My way to feel whole. May I never be complete and may I never feel content – please, let me always have the need, always...

For a poet, it will be terrible if there are no women. He will not have anything to write about.

Every time a poet is about to write, every time the open their mouth to say something, they express their inner world and tell of their own feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and opinions, unless they are...

Use all the ugliness you’re feeling to make something beautiful

Just take my hand, lead, dance with me…and I will simply follow the blueness of the water, the white waves rolling free…where the earth beneath my feet and stars make my heart whole again…in long...

Had in him those brave translunary things/ That the first poets had.

I crave for knowledge. I envy tolerant, peaceful folks. I am frightened by ignorance. I loathe violence.

Nations conquered and true love prevails, all encompassed in a poets tale.

Dance is the divine art that empowers a lady to express her most sacred emotions through the majesty of movements.

If you can’t tell from my rap lyrics already, yes I am a feminist. And when I’m saying “hoe” or “bitch” I am actually referring to men. …That sounded bad, in someway. But at the...

People can’t see that if I had not been a poet, I could never have had such success as a traveler.

Growing up, I’d already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician. Maybe an artist. I’d dress in black turtlenecks and smoke Gitanes. I’d listen to cool jazz...