"We love the things we love for what they are."
— Robert Frost

"Resist much. Obey little."
— Walt Whitman

"Unbeing dead isn't being alive."
— e.e. cummings

"You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts."
— Kahlil Gibrán

"Poetry is what gets lost in translation."
— Robert Frost

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"
— Mary Oliver (New and Selected Poems)

"You only live twice:
Once when you're born
And once when you look death in the face."
— Ian Fleming (You Only Live Twice)

"Whereas story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world."
— Jasper Fforde (First Among Sequels)

"Always be a poet, even in prose."
— Charles Baudelaire

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry."
— Emily Dickinson

"Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
— Alfred Lord Tennyson (Idylls of the King and a Selection of Poems)

"Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
'Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.'"
— Billy Collins

"A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him."
— Dylan Thomas

"It was at that age
that poetry came in search of me"
— Pablo Neruda (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair: Dual Language Edition)

"XV

We the mortals touch the metals,
the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,
knowing they will go on, inert or burning,
and I was discovering, naming all the these things:
it was my destiny to love and say goodbye."
— Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day)

"There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it"
— Gustave Flaubert

"If you must write prose or poems, the words you use should be your own. Don't plagerise 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."
— Morrissey

"A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times."
— Randall Jarell

"Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason."
— Novalis

"After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that is all you know words not their feelings or what they mean and you write because you know them not because you understand them because you don't you are stupid and lazy and will never be great but you do what you know because what else is there?"
— Frank O'Hara (The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara)

"Poetry = Anger x Imagination"
— Sherman Alexie

"Winter solitude-
in a world of one colour
the sound of the wind."
— Matsuo Basho

"Don't Worry Be Happy"
— Meher Baba

"We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;"
— T.S. Eliot

"Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed."
— William Blake

"SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.


Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame."
— W.H. Auden

"We the mortals touch the metals,
the wind, the ocean shores, the stones,
knowing they will go on, inert or burning,
and I was discovering, naming all the these things:
it was my destiny to love and say goodbye."
— Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day)

"Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world,
which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle
and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

From Dover Beach"
— Matthew Arnold (Dover Beach and Other Poems)

"XVII

The days aren't discarded or collected, they are bees
that burned with sweetness or maddened
the sting: the struggle continues,
the journeys go and come between honey and pain.
No, the net of years doesn't unweave: there is no net.
They don't fall drop by drop from a river: there is no river.
Sleep doesn't divide life into halves,
or action, or silence, or honor:
life is like a stone, a single motion,
a lonesome bonfire reflected on the leaves,
an arrow, only one, slow or swift, a metal
that climbs or descends burning in your bones."
— Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day)

"A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote."
— Yevgeny Yevtushenko

"What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms."
— Issa

"Summer night-
even the stars
are whipering to each other.
"
— Issa

"Were knowledge all, what were our need
To thrill and faint and sweetly bleed?"
— Christopher Brennan

"XVI

Each intheh most hidden sack kept
the lost jewels of memory,
intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses,
the fragment of public or private happiness.
A few,the wolves, collected thighs,
other men loved the dawn scratching
mountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers.
For me happiness was to share singing,
praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes.
I ask forgiveness for my bad ways:
my life had no use on earth."
— Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day)

"This autumn-
why am I growing old?
bird disappearing among clouds."
— Matsuo Basho

"The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream."
— Wallace Stevens (The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens)

"Calligraphy of geese
against the sky-
the moon seals it."
— Buson Yosa

"Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape?"
— Lucy Grealy

"I act as the tongue of you,
... tied in your mouth . . . . in mine it begins to be loosened."
— Walt Whitman

"For darkness restores what light cannot repair."
— Joseph Brodsky

"Here
I'm here-
the snow falling."
— Issa

"XVI

Each in the most hidden sack kept
the lost jewels of memory,
intense love, secret nights and permanent kisses,
the fragment of public or private happiness.
A few,the wolves, collected thighs,
other men loved the dawn scratching
mountain ranges or ice floes, locomotives, numbers.
For me happiness was to share singing,
praising, cursing, crying with a thousand eyes.
I ask forgiveness for my bad ways:
my life had no use on earth.

(translated by William O'Daly)"
— Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day)

"...and death i think is no parenthesis"
— e.e. cummings (Cummings: Him)

""I'm at that place I grew up to leave." "
— Adrian C. Louis (Fire Water World: Poems)

"A grain of poetry suffices to season a century.
"
— José Martí (Versos Sencillos: Simple Verses)

"But drunkenly, or secretly, we swore,
Disciples of that astigmatic saint,
That we would never leave the island
Until we had put down, in paint, in words,
As palmists learn the network of a hand,
All of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines,
Every neglected, self-pitying inlet
Muttering in brackish dialect, the ropes of mangroves
From which old soldier crabs slipped
Surrendering to slush,
Each ochre track seeking some hilltop and
Losing itself in an unfinished phrase,
Under sand shipyards where the burnt-out palms
Inverted the design of unrigged schooners,
Entering forests, boiling with life,
Goyave, corrosol, bois-canot, sapotille.
Days!

The sun drumming, drumming,
Past the defeated pennons of the palms,
Roads limp from sunstroke,
Past green flutes of the grass
The ocean cannonading, come!
Wonder that opened like the fan
Of the dividing fronds
On some noon-struck sahara,
Where my heart from its rib cage yelped like a pup
After clouds of sanderlings rustily wheeling
The world on its ancient,
Invisible axis,
The breakers slow-dolphining over more breakers,
To swivel our easels down, as firm
As conquerors who had discovered home."
— Derek Walcott, Another Life, Chapter 8, Part II

"Tears upon the dry sponge of heart
do not prove I am Promethean."
— Adrian C. Louis (Fire Water World: Poems)