Quotes about Poet

The poet discovers himself alone on a darkened stage, suffering temporary amnesia. What terror not to be able to remember or to imagine what you wanted to say. A language dysfunction, a disease of imagination's present time. The expectant audience sits unmoving and utterly silent. A small asexual voice offstage prompts the first words of a monologue in whispers, and the poet begins to speak, a time-delayed recitation of the future. A light at the back of his head comes on and moves to direct his footsteps as the ghostly unembodied voice continues to prompt him. When it stops, he asks himself: 'What was I saying, what was it I wanted to say? This is a play I am making up and someone is directing me from the wings. I want to scratch at the back of my head where the light is coming from, but it only gutters when I swing my hand and remains out of reach. There is a silence you choose and a silence that descends on you when the prompter decides to make you nervous, and that is terrifying. I cannot memorize what I will think to say when it tells me. It is so unnewtonian it takes your breath away."

A poet, is before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. 

It's so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that's what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower is to bloom."

"a woman can't survive
by her own breath
alone
she must know
the voices of mountains"

Love life, engage in it, give it all you've got. love it with a passion, because life truly does give back, many times over, what you put into it.

We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.

The night has been long,
The wound has been deep,
The pit has been dark,
And the walls have been steep.

The Iranian Girl

There's a hole in the ground
A moving of earth, now made
A sad depression
Where once she played in
Puddle-rain
Splashing with the joy that comes
From child-like feet

The sound is still here
In the air, the breeze yet carrying
The secret laughter
That haunts the waking hours of those
Who've lost the way

How vain to think that
Memory can be erased

All will remember
No one escapes

I wonder if she saw it
The moment before
Her hair still flying free
The metal catching that last
Pure glint of sun

Did she hear the explosion
That made no sense
Did she feel
Her body come apart
And fall like dust, too soon

Does anyone ask
Whatever she felt, whatever she dreamed
Her dreaming time is gone
And no lofty word of God or
Glory will ever make it right

Dare to listen and you will
Hear her
Dare to open your eyes and see

The Iranian girl
No different
Like you, like me.

ODE TO AN ENDANGERED SPECIES

Will you not leave us here too long
We have not paid attention
To squander the best of the world
A pity we do not understand
Ourselves
No more you fly in the wind
No more the buoyant ripples on a pristine pool
The splash of color in a worn-tore land
No more
The survivor's sad lament
Yet no weeping will there be when
Your perfect, singular form
Vanishes
The muted salting of a wounded Earth
And all that is and all that ever was will
In some way be
Diminished
For the loss, though unnoticed
Will be recognized
In the stillness of eternal night.

There is no nobler profession, nor no greater calling, than to be among those unheralded many who gave and give their lives to the preservation of human knowledge, passed with commitment and care from one generation to the next.

Poetry is the art of using language to transcend language.

We have to become a force that moves the world to a higher level.

While I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors. “He doesn’t know,” my friend whispered excitedly. “He’s passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He’s in another play; he doesn’t see us. He doesn’t know. Maybe it’s happening right now to us.

It is quite evident that a barrier must be cleared in order to escape the psychologists and enter into a realm which is not "auto-observant", where we ourselves no longer divide ourselves into observer and observed. Then the dreamer is completely dissolved in his reverie. His reverie is his silent life. It is that silent peace which the poet wants to convey to us.

In living off all the reflecting light furnished by poets, the I which dreams the reverie reveals itself not as poet but as poetizing I.

Of course, a psychologist would find it more direct to study the inspired poet. He would make concrete studies of inspiration in individual geniuses. But for all that, would he experience the phenomena of inspiration? His human documentation gathered from inspired poets could hardly be related, except from the exterior, in an ideal of objective observations. Comparison of inspired poets would soon make us lose sight of inspiration.

The poet must put on the passion he wants to represent.

Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers.

Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become.

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

Early in my research, that strange phenomenon which Carl Jung called synchronicity brought me in touch with the single most amazing Baconian artifact I could have imagined. Most readers are familiar with such surprising events. Suddenly out of nowhere, just at the right time and the right place, some essential object or information will appear, as though a genie had been at work behind the scenes.

For me this surprise came in the shape of a strange wooden contraption known as a cipher wheel. On the printed pages affixed to it, in a most ingenious code is recorded the true story of Francis Bacon-an account actually and incredibly written by him in his own words. It is a story that changes the current concept of English history. No longer was guesswork necessary. Now the task was to fit the details of Bacon's life, as the cipher gives it, into accepted records of history.

The Shakespeare Code is my attempt to do just that and to explain what the cipher wheel is and why Bacon felt the need to create the ciphers. It is a poignant and tragic tale-but one that ends on an unexpected note of triumph. It is a story that is crying out to be told.