Sanctuary

God, today as never before , we all need to listen to our poets, read them, feel them, and become them.


Do we need
to seek succor
in the San Juans?
Can we withstand
the New Crusades?
Will poetry
provide sanctuary
for our wounded souls?
Damn rights it will.

Glenn Buttkus (1944-)


A poet's autobiography
is his poetry.
Anything else can only be
a footnote.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko ( b. 1933 )


Words are,
of course,
the most powerful drug
used by mankind.

Rudyard Kibling (1865-1936)


All poets who,
when reading from
their own words,
experience
a choked feeling,
are major.

E.B. White(1899-1985)


To a poet,
silence is an acceptable response,
even a flattering one.

Colette (1873-1954)


Poetry is the clear expression
of mixed feelings.

W.H. Auden(1907-1973)


Writing free verse
is like playing tennis
with the net down.

Robert Frost (1874-1963)
[Oh Rob, you need to read more Walt Whitman and Glenn Buttkus and Sherman Alexie. Your arrogance is not acceptable, man.]

Poetry is a way
of taking life
by the throat.

Robert Frost (1874-1963)


I am not a teacher,
but an awakener.

Robert Frost (1874-1963)


The poet makes
silk dresses
out of worms.

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)


A line of verse
need not necessarily
be beautiful
for it to remain in the depths
of our memory.

Colette (1873-1954)

Take a common
place,
clean and polish it,
light it so that it produces
the same effect of youth
and freshness and spontaneity
as it did originally,
and you have done a poet's job.

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)


Poetry atrophies
when it gets too far
from music.

Ezra Pound(1885-1972)
[Pay attention, Dougie]


Poetry is
the true source of music.

Hugo Wolf (1860-1903)
[Ms. Shapiro, are you there?]

A great poet is
the most precious jewel
of a nation.

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827)
[Hear, hear, Sir Savant]

Having verse set to music
is like looking
at a painting
through a stained-glass window.

Paul Valery(1871-1945)
[Careful Paul, you wander in a minefield of controversary there.]


Like a piece of ice
on a hot stove
the poem must ride
on its own melting.

Robert Frost (1874-1963)


Poetry is at bottom
criticism of life.

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)


In this nadir of poetic repute,
when the only verse
most people read
from one year's end to the next
is what appears on greeting cards,
it is well for us
to stop and consider
poets...
Poets
are the leaven
in the lump
of civilization.

Elizabeth Janeway ( b. 1913 )


Poetry is the record
of the best and happiest
moments
of the happiest
and best minds.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)


You will find poetry
nowhere,
unless you bring some
with you.

Joseph Joubert (1754-1824)

He who draws noble delights
from the sentiments
of poetry
is a true poet,
though he has never written a line
in his life.

George Sand aka: Amandine Lucie Aurore Dupin (1804-1876)


The most important thing
about a poem
is the reader.

Mark Van Doren (1894-1972)


The poetry is myself.

Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)

Poetry does not consist
in saying everything,
but in making one's dream
everything.

Charles Augkustin Sainte-Beauve (1804-1869)


gave up
on new poetry myself
thirty years ago,
when most of it
began to read
like coded messages,
passing between lonely aliens
on a hostile world.

Russell Baker ( b. 1925 )


Always be a poet,
even in prose.
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)
[Oh Charlie, you were my hero, enit!]


God is the perfect poet.

Robert Browning (1812-1889)


Poetry is
just the evidence of life.
If your life is burning well,
poetry is just the ash.

Leonard Cohen ( b. 1934 )


Poetry is what gets lost in translation.
Poetry is about grief.
Politics is about the grievance.

Robert Frost (1874-1963)


Poetry is nearer
to vital truth
than history.

Plato (427 BC-347 BC)


Poetry is the journal
of the sea animal
living on land,
wanting to fly in the air.

Poetry is a search for syllables
to shoot at the barriers
of the unknown
and the unknowable.

Poetry is a phantom script
telling how rainbows are made,
and why they go away.

Poetry is a pack sack
of invisible keepsakes.

Poetry is an echo
asking a shadow to dance.

I have written some poetry
I don't understand myself.

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)


There is poetry
as soon as we realize
that we possess
nothing.

John Cage (1912-1992)


A poet must leave traces
of his passage,
not proof.

Rene Char (Current)

The poets have been
mysteriously silent
on the subject of cheese.

Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936)


The poet does not invent,
he listens.
A true poet does not bother
to be poetical,
nor does a gardener
scent his roses.
The poet is a liar
who always speaks the truth.

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)


A prose writer gets tired
of writing prose,
and wants to be a poet.
So he begins every line
with a capital letter,
and keeps on writing prose.

Samuel McChord Crothers (Current)
[Sammy, read some Glenn Buttkus prose. It will open your jaded eyes, sir.]



Poetry is language
at its most distilled
and powerful.

Ruth Dove ( b. 1952 )


Geniune poetry can communicate
before it is understood.

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)


Poetry is ordinary language
raised to the Nth degree.
Poetry is boned with ideas,
nerved and blooded
with emotions,
all held together
by a delicate tough skin
of words.

Paul Engle (Current)


A poem is time
if it hangs together.
Information points to something else.
A poem points to nothing
but itself.

Edward M. Forster (1879-1970)


A poet is a bird
of unearthly excellence,
who escapes from his celestial realm,
and arrives in this world
warbling.

If we do not cherish him,
he spreads his wings
and flies back
to his homeland.

Poetry is a deal of joy
and pain and wonder,
with a dash of
dictionary.

Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931)


Poetry is thoughts that breathe,
and words that burn.

Thomas Gray (1716-1771)


If Galileo had said in verse
that the world moved,
the inquistion might have
left him alone.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)


Poetry is all
that is worth remembering
in life.

William Hazlitt (1778-1830)


No poems can please for long,
or live for long,
that are written
by water drinkers.

Horace (65 BC-8 BC)


Even when poetry has a meaning,
as it usually has,
it may be inadvisable
to draw it out.
Perfect understanding will sometime
almost extinquish
pleasure.

A.E. Housman (Current)


Poetry is the art
of uniting
pleasure with truth.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)


Poetry should strike the reader
as a wording of his own
highest thoughts,
and appear almos
ta remembrance.

John Keats (1795-1821)


Poetry heals the wounds
inflicted by reason.

Novalis (1772-1801)


Poetry is the revelation
of a feeling
that the poet believes
to be interior and personal,
which the reader recognizes
as his own.

Salvatore Quasimodo ( b. 1901 )


The poem
is the point at which
our strength gave out.

Richard Rosen (Current)


Science is for those who learn;
poetry is for those who know.

Joseph Roux (1834-1905)


A poet's work
is to name the unnameable,
to point at frauds,
to take sides,
start arguments,
shape the world,
and stop it from going to sleep.

Salman Rushdie ( b. 1947 )
[My man, Rushdie!]



Poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)


Poetry is an orphan of silence.
The words never quite equal
the experience behind them.

Charles Simic (Current)


A poet looks at the world,
the way a man
looks at a woman.

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)


You can tear a poem apart,
to see what makes it tick...
You're back with the mystery
of having been moved by words.
The best craftsmanship
always leaves holes and gaps...
so that something that is not
in the poem
can creep, crawl, flash, or thunder
in.

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)


The poet may be used as a barometer,
but let's not forget
that he is also
part of the weather.

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975)


The poet is
in the end
more afraid of the dogmatist,
who wants to extract the message
from the poem
and then throw the poem away,
than he is of the sentimentalist,
who says,
Oh,
just let me enjoy the poem.

The poem is a little myth
of man's capacity
for making life meaningful.
And in the end,
the poem is not a thing
we see-it is rather
a light by which we may see-
and what we actually see
is life.

Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)


He lives the poetry
that he cannot write.
The others write the poetry
that they dare not realize.

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)


Round and round,
like a dance of snow,
in a dazzling drift,
as it guardians go
floating the women,
faded for ages,
sculpted in stone
on the poet's pages.

Robert Browning (1812-1889)