A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“A poem is an invocation, rebellious return to the blessedness of beginning again, wandering free in pure process of forgetting and finding.”
Source: My Emily Dickinson
“A poem is but a thought, a mere memory caught at play. From hand onto paper, bleeding thoughts emerge.”
“A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.”
Source: Selected Writings of Charles Olson
“A poem is good if it contains a new analogy and startles the reader out of the habit of treating words as counters.”
“A poem is good until one knows by whom it is.”
Source: Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms
“A poem is learned by heart and then not again repeated. We will suppose that after a half year it has been forgotten: no effort of recollection is able to call it back again into consciousness.”
Source: Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology
“A poem is like a child; at some point we have to let it go and trust that it will make its own way in the world.”
Source: The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry
“A poem is like a painting.”
“A poem is like a person. The more you know someone, the more you realize there is always something more to know and understand. A final understanding could probably only begin upon permanent separation, or death. This is why we come back to certain poems, as we do to places or people, to experience and re-experience, to see ourselves for who we truly are, and to continue to be changed.”
“A poem is like a radio that can broadcast continuously for thousands of years.”
“A poem is like a score for the human voice.”
“a poem is like a wine glass in which you can hold up a little bit of reality and taste it.”
“A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.”
“A poem is never finished, only abandoned.”
“A poem is no place for an idea.”
“A poem is not an object to give the hand but a treasure to give the mind.”
Source: The Bird and the Blade
“A poem is not just words placed on a line. It's a cloth. Mahmoud Darwish wanted to build his home, his exile, from all the words in the world. I weave my poems with my veins. I want to build a poem like a solid home, but hopefully not with my bones.”
Source: Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza
“A poem is playing with many words which gives many giggles after a happy day or not so happy day.”
“A poem is really a kind of machine for producing the poetic state by means of words.”
“A poem is something sacred. Let no one Take it for anything except itself.”
“A poem is the perfect place to celebrate imperfection and exult in the ways you fall short of being the person you want to be.”
“A poem is the realization of love. . . .”
“A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/...the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.”
“A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.”
“A poem is what the reader lives through under the guidance of the text and experiences as relevant to the text.”
“A poem is wonderful
Only when it can evoke
Those razor sharp reactions!”
Source: the frozen evenings
“A poem is, so to speak, a way of making you forget how you wrote it.”
Source: A sad heart at the supermarket: essays & fables
“A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry's language carries what lives outside language. It's as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves.”
“A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.”
Source: the man of letters in the modern world
“A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being.”
“A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.”
“A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have.”
“A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants you to understand things only years later.”
Source: Twenty Questions
“A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.”
“A poem often begins in the midst of wonderful wandering thoughts that are eager to open wings to fly in the beautiful blue sky of imagination.”
“A poem really does recreate the language, and that's what it has to do. A true poem, I think, has to give you that shiver. That, "yes, it's never been said quite that way before."”
“A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.”
Source: Deep Play
“A poem round and perfect as a star.”
Source: Poems
“A poem-shaped space, I thought. A poem-shaped space. I tried to hold a poem-shaped space in my mind. Sometimes the work of life is like preparing a bedroom for a guest: sweeping the floor, emptying the ash-tray, watering the sloping aloe plant. Opening the window wide to let new air in. I did all this inside my head, behind my eyes, while my fingers made words appear and waited for that guest to arrive.”
Source: Do You Remember Being Born?
“A poem should be odd as a small cast-iron platypus.”
Source: Skid
“A Poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit.”
“A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.”
“A poem should create thought and emotion, whether that intended or not.”
“A poem should improve on the blank page.”
“A poem should never be a tourniquet
You have to let the blood goes where it wants”
Source: Pamper Me to Hell & Back
“A poem should not mean but be.”
“A poem shouldn't just give melody; it should give meaning.”
Source: Wealth of Words
“A poem that is itself a name does not yearn for the name of its creator, but shines from its name alone.”
Source: Serbian Satire and Aphorisms
“A poem was a box for your soul. That was the point. It was the place where you could save bits of yourself, and shake out your darkest feelings, without worrying that people would think you were strange. While I was writing, I would forget myself and everyone else; poetry made me feel part of something noble and beautiful and bigger than me. [...] I slid them under the carpet as soon as they were done, all the images and rhymes wrestled into place. By the time I had copied them out, I found I had memorized every line. Then they would surprise me by surging through me, like songs I knew by heart.”
Source: Once in a House on Fire
“A poem with grandly conceived and executed stanzas, such as one of Keats's odes, should be like an enfilade of rooms in a palace: one proceeds, with eager anticipation, from room to room.”