Oh what a poet I will flay myself into.

the intensityin your eyesburns my penas i write.

When there’s a moon the shadows in the house grow larger;invisible hands draw back the curtains,a pallid finger writes forgotten words on dustof the piano…

The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of (Charles) Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.

Repetita iuvant. Italy, a land of great saints, poets, sailors, artists, statesmen, businessmen, lawyers, intellectuals, professors, journalists, whores, gangsters, religious parasites and dickheads.

There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata; there is a thunder note in an angry sky.

We need knew knights, but without swords.

Teaching others, he corrected himself.

What stirs lyrical poets to their finest flights is neither the delight of the senses nor the fruitful contentment of the settled couple; not the satisfaction of love, but its passion. And passion means suffering.

You don’t sound like a scientist; you sound like a poet.” Rey smiled. “Can I be both?” “But you’d rather be a poet.””Who wouldn’t?” he said.

When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds – like those horses that...

My face responds without authorization from my brain, so the resulting smile feels like the biggest, most unguarded, goofiest smile I’ve ever unleashed in my entire life. I didn’t even know my face could do...

she wanted because art

Poetry makes nothing happen.

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

for we all have our own twilights and mistsand abyssesto return to.

August is dust here. Droughtstuns the road,but juice gathers in the berries.

The bats inebriate the sky . . .

God is busy and has no time for you.

Beyond all vanities, fights, and desires, omnipotent silence lies.

Say No! Accept the burdens of revenge.

Through words to the meaning of thoughts with no words.

A poet should be so crafty with words that he is envied even for his pains.

A true poet is one who can appreciate the disciplines and structures of any and all styles of poetry.

I am talking about the responsibility of the poet, who is irresponsible by definition, an anarchist enamored of a solar order and never of the new order or whatever slogan makes five or six hundred...

The eclipses ofpoets are not foretold in the calender.

Don’t bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.

Poetry is a finikin thing of airThat lives uncertainly and not for longYet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.

It is kind of ridiculous that a poet is expected to live in the real world.

I live there…where the birds are infiniteeverywherewhere they fleeit’s a place your eyes can wanderbut never seeWhere everyone accepts me,Without any pretenseIt’s a place your mind can picturebut never really comprehend.

An owl sound wandered along the road with me.I didn’t hear it–I breathed it into my ears.

. . .criticism is to poetry as air is to a noise: it allows it to be heard; and even if we can’t see it or feel it, it is there, shaping how we hear.

Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.

He confided his deepest secret to you; be always wary of his secret.

We forget old stories, but those stories remain the same.

Procreation annihilates eternity.

Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.

Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself...

Novelists invent characters; poets invent themselves.

Because who hasn’t tried to pull their arms from the sleeves of gravity’s lead coat?Who doesn’t have at least one pair of wax wings out in the garage?

Forse ogni poeta è condannato all’insoddisfazione. Dev’essere per colpa della luce che li abbaglia

A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.

may this poetrybe the homeyou will someday come back to.

… the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee grinder.

Authority forgets a dying king

Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously...

Great poets are great copy editors.

Christ did not ask or want to be what he was not.

Universe is the Sun watching its own self.

It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that...