20th Century Poets From The United States

"The wilderness begins at the edge of my body, at the edge of my consciousness, and extends to the edge of the universe, and it is filled with menace."

"I had always been aware that the Universe is sad; everything in it, animate or inanimate, the wild creatures, the stones, the stars, was enveloped in the great sadness, pervaded by it. [...] Never then or now have I been able to look at a cloudless sky at night and see beauty there."

"This is not a man who sits down to "write a poem"; rather, some burden of understanding and feeling, some need to know, forces his poems into being. Thoreau said, "Be it life or death, what we crave is reality." So it is with Carruth. And even in hell, knowledge itself bestows a halo around the consciousness with, at moments, attains it."

"In all marriages there is struggle and ours was no different in that regard. But we always came to the other shore, dusted off, and said, There you are, my love."

"Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand"

"Have you located your passion as if this was your last night on earth?"

"I been in sorrow’s kitchen and done licked out all the pots. Nobody knows the trouble I seen. Steal away to Jesus. I ain’t got long to stay here."

"My mother-in-law’s last night on earth, a fox crossed our path in Branford, Connecticut, as we left the hospice. We knew somehow that it was her, as I now know the ravenous hawk came to take Ficre. Do I believe that? Yes, I do. Poetic logic is my logic. I do not believe she was a fox. But I believe the fox was a harbinger. I believe that it was a strange enough occurrence that it should be heeded. Zememesh Berhe, the quick, red fox, soon passed from this life to the next"

"The story seems to begin with catastrophe but in fact began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story. Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love.”"

"“I wake up grateful, for life is a gift."

"It’s a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.”"

"What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance."

"Each of us made it possible for the other. We got something done. Each believed in the other unsurpassingly"

"It happened; it is part of who we are; it is our beauty and our terror. We must be gleaners from what life has set before us."

"Flowers live, they are perfect and they affect us; they are God’s glory, they make us know why we are alive and human, that we behold. They are beautiful, and then they die and rot and go back to the earth that gave birth to them."

"“friendship in marriage is its own thing: friendship in a cup of tea, or a glass of wine, or a cappuccino every Sunday morning. Friendship in buying undershirts and underpants. Friendship in picking up a prescription or rescuing the towed car. Friendship in waiting for the phone call after the mammogram. Friendship in toast buttered just so. Friendship in shoveling the snow. I am the one you want to tell. You are the one I want to tell"

"Henry Ford believed the soul of a person is located in their last breath and so captured the last breath of his best friend Thomas Edison in a test tube and kept it evermore."

"Death comes with a gift in the poem; our loved ones tell us here that what we see with our eyes is different from what we know: “The things/themselves.” “Oh, at last” is the moment of exaltation in the poem. Lamentation and exaltation are simultaneous here."

"In the absence of organized religion, faith abounds, in the form of song and art and food and strong arms"

"Using the voice is a physical act, one that first announces the existence of the body of residence and then trumpets its arrival in a public space"

"They shared an unshakeable belief in beauty, in overflow, in everythingness, the bursting, indelible beauty in a world where there is so much suffering and wounding and pain"

"Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss.”"

"I have not yet learned to use our television DVR. One of the points of marriage is that you split labor. In the olden days that meant one hunted and one gathered; now it means one knows where the tea-towels are kept and the other knows how to program the DVR, for why should we both have to know?"

"Now I know for sure the soul is an evanescent thing and the body is its temporary container, because I saw it. I saw the body with the soul in it, I saw the body with the soul leaving, and I saw the body with the soul gone.”"

"To live in memory and in dreams is a cruel comfort"

"Art replaces the light that is lost when the day fades, the moment passes, the evanescent extraordinary makes its quicksilver. Art tries to capture that which we know leaves us, as we move in and out of each other’s lives, as we all must eventually leave this earth. Great artists know that shadow, work always against the dying light, but always knowing that the day brings new light and that the ocean which washes away all traces on the sand leaves us a new canvas with each wave"

"For loss is our common denominator. None of us will escape it. None of us will outrun death. What do we do in the space between that is our lives? What is the quality and richness of our lives? How do we move through struggle and let community hold us when we have been laid low? This"

"Loss is not felt in the absence of love"

"Each of us made it possible for the other. We got something done. Each believed in the other unsurpassingly. In all marriages there is struggle and ours was no different in that regard. But we always came to the other shore, dusted off, and said, There you are, my love.”"

"Youth is a silly, vapid state, Old age with fears and ills is rife; This simple boon I beg of Fate — A thousand years of Middle Life."

"He laughs best who laughs last, The wiseacres vow; But I am impatient, I want to laugh now."

"Advice is one of those things it is far more blessed to give than to receive."

"I don't believe the half I hear, Nor the quarter of what I see! But I have one faith, sublime and true, That nothing can shake or slay; Each spring I firmly believe anew All the seed catalogues say!"

"It is the interest one takes in books that makes a library. And if a library have interest it is; if not, it isn't."

"A blunder at the right moment is better than cleverness at the wrong time."

"A guilty conscience is the mother of invention."

"Of two evils choose the prettier."

"I love the Christmas-tide, and yet, I notice this, each year I live; I always like the gifts I get, But how I love the gifts I give!"

"The books we think we ought to read are poky, dull, and dry; The books that we would like to read we are ashamed to buy; The books that people talk about we never can recall; And the books that people give us — oh, they’re the worst of all!"

"They borrow books they will not buy, They have no ethics or religions; I wish some kind Burbankian guy Could cross my books with homing pigeons!"

"“A noble theme!” the tyro cried; And straightway scribbled off a sonnet. “A noble theme,” the poet sighed; “I am not fit to write upon it.”"

"A cynic is a man who looks at the world with a monocle in his mind's eye."

"Women are door-mats and have been,— The years those mats applaud,— They keep their men from going in With muddy feet to God."

"Yet we will cross the seas again To Europe's tortured sod, With those who, though not brothers born, Are brothers under God. Since we have sworn our manhood's oath, We stand to make it good Against the mightiest foes of earth, Whatever be their blood. For we are all Americans, And we shall fight our way To victory and back again, And then come home to stay."

"Written in an English of singular resonance, of lyric richness informed by history, by legend, by political awareness, and everywhere by a deep perception, the poems of this and her other books bring her background of Philippine culture, its past and present, into the larger world of late 20th Century concerns. This is a poetry outside of schools, of fads and fashion, highly accomplished and deserving of wide, enthusiastic readership."

"I think what I was trying to say in Trill & Mordent (2005) is that we are all affected by this climate of anxiety; we're living in an age of terror. People are getting deployed; there's the fear of avian flu, and those riots in Paris. What do you do in the face of anxiety? Do you go into a hole and shut yourself up in a safe place and not come out again? I've heard people say how hard it was for them to do the normal things they enjoyed after 9/11, or after those sniper shootings, or after every event tinged with tragedy or trauma. But you need to find a way back to the experience of beauty and release, and I think that's what I was trying to say in this book. (2006)"

"O, England's full of Englishmen And France is full of French, And Italy has sons enough To fill up ev'ry trench; But what are we across the sea Who come from all the earth To the land that gives us freedom,— Though it did not give us birth? O, we are all Americans, And when we come away From England, France and Italy, We swore we came to stay."

"I feel that poetry is mystery, an intangible magic that I approach again and again in the hopes that I might be able to learn some of its lessons well. (2006)"

"If you're a writer, you do get pulled toward that, attracted toward that idea of duality, because it is what attracts you to language. The idea of language as not just attentive to the surface matter of experience, but to the other things that might lie underneath, is why we write. (2006)"

"And we will lift our country's flag And float its Stripes and Stars In place of those we used to wave For Kaisers, Kings and Czars."