Let cloud shapes swarm, / Let chaos storm, / I wait for form.
Poetry is the renewal of words, setting them free, and that's what a poet is doing: loosening the words.
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. . . . Read it a hundred times; it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.
I came from a very intellectual neighborhood. When we played cowboys and Indians as kids, I had to be Gandhi.
The artist in me cries out for design.
The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.
O hushed October morning mild, Thy leaves have ripened to the fall; Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild, Should waste them all. The crows above the forest call; Tomorrow they may form and go. O hushed October morning mild, Begin the hours of this day slow. Make the day seem to us less brief. Hearts not averse to being beguiled, Beguile us in the way you know. Release one leaf at break of day; At noon release another leaf; One from our trees, one far away.
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.
Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
The only way out is through.
The tree the tempest with a crash of wood Throws down in front of us is not to bar Our passage to our journey's end for good, But just to ask us who we think we are.
Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
A voice said, Look me in the stars And tell me truly, men of earth, If all the soul-and-body scars Were not too much to pay for birth.
Yes, of course [this age] is materialistic, but the only way to counteract it is to create spiritual things. Don't worry yourself about the materialism too much. Create and stir other people to create!
The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued.
They would not find me changed from him they knew - only more sure of all I thought was true.
The old dog barks backward without getting up I can remember when he was a pup.
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day; And give us not to think so far away As the uncertain harvest; keep us here All simply in the springing of the year. Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white, Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night; And make us happy in the happy bees, The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.
A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
It looked as if a night of dark intent was coming, and not only a night, an age. Someone had better be prepared for rage.
The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.
Life must be kept up at a great rate in order to absorb any considerable amount of learning.
I am not a teacher. I am an awakener.
Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
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