Celebrating National Poetry Month, 30 Quotes and Counting

a bit of poetry outside the window March 2019

April arrives bringing with it once more a month of celebrating poetry (National Poetry Month origin, here). My share in the celebration, along with a goal of reading more poetry this month as well as challenging myself to write 30-haiku-in-30 days again (last year's challenge, here)--is the following compilation of 30 of my favorite quotes on poetry. Each brings its own inspiration, one each day of the month to stir up the imagination toward poetry. Let the celebration begin...

  1. "Poetry is the languages of surprises." --Stephen Taylor Goldsberry
  2. "The poet doesn't invent. He listens." --Jean Cocteau
  3. "Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes." --Carl Sandburg
  4. "Prose is a photography, poetry is a painting in oil colors." --Austin O'Malley
  5. "It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things." --Steven Mallarme
  6. "The poet lights the light and fades away, But the light goes on and on." --Emily Dickinson
  7. "I would define, in brief, the poetry of words is the rhythmical creation of Beauty."-Edgar Allen Poe 
  8. "Poetry is an echo asking a shadow to dance." --Carl Sandburg
  9. "Poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement." --Christopher Fry
10. "I have never started a poem whose end I knew, writing the poem is discovering."--Robert Frost
11. "Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land wanting to fly in the air." --Carl Sandburg
12. "If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."--Emily Dickinson
13. "Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing." --James Tate
14. "A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language." --W.H. Auden
15. "The true poem rests between the words." --Vanna Bonta
16. "Poetry is life distilled." --Gwendalyn Brooks
17. "Writing a poem is making music with words and space." --Arnold Adoff
18. "Prose is words in their best order; poetry is the best words in their best order."--Samuel Coleridge
19. "A poem is a spider web, Spun with words of wonder; Woven lace held in place, by whispers made of thunder" --Charles Ghigna
20. "Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words."-Robert Frost
21. "Poetry is a section of river fog and morning boat-lights delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, 'Oh!' and another, 'How?'" --Carl Sandburg
22. "Some of the greatest poetry is revealing to the reader the beauty in something that was so simple you had taken it for granted." --Neil de Grasse Tyso, astrophysicist
23. "Poetry is the impish attempt to paint the color of the wind." --Maxwell Bodenheim
24. "Poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry." --Mary Oliver
25. "How do poems grow? They grow out of your life." --Robert Penn Warren
26. "Poetry makes life what lights and music do to the stage." --Charles Dickens
27. "Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently." --Jean Cocteau
28. "Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings." --W.H. Auden
29. "Poetry has the power to turn words into darts that shoot under your skin."--Penny Ashton
30. "A poet can survive everything but a misprint." --Oscar Wilde

Happy Poetry Month 2019. How does poetry stir your world?

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Haiku A to Z: Q is for Quiet, with Quotes

following quiet path 2014

"Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world." --Hans Margolius

In an article at Poetry Through the Ages titled "Movement Frozen in Time" (here), a quiet picture of haiku masters is painted: "The beauty of haiku often becomes the bane of impatient writers: capturing a single moment, movement, or experience in its entirety, in three lines totaling 17 syllables or less. The masters of form spent years of traveling, wandering, observing, contemplating, and writing to refine their craft into the timeless flashes that populate haiku collections and anthologies today."

Imagine the moments of quiet they relished as they lived out their quest. Might we not benefit from some of that, too? Perhaps a slower pace, taking intentional time for reflection, or even curtailed electronic device time? Haiku--writing and/or reading--can also create these kinds of moments.

Actually, any form of poetry can help accomplish this. A few quotes to inspire us on our way:

"Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance." --Carl Sandburg

"Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry." --Muriel Rukeyser

"The world is full of poetry. The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies and sparkle in its brightness." --James Gates Percival

"It is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star. It is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us." --John Ruskin

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

...and a personal favorite:

"Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering." --Pooh's Little Instruction Book, inspired by A. A. Milne

And so in a moment of quietness I share day seventeen haiku:

quest for haiku path 

begins long before words pass

from pen to paper

--Kenda Turner

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