Poets From The United States

"I write for young girls of color, for girls who don’t even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive. I can only change how they live, not how they think. I want to say, “Here, look where you can live, look what you can think.” I concentrate on giving this to young people because they are the treasurers of black culture."

"We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil."

"…gender is cultural: we have menarche to deal with, virginity, menopause, pregnancy, childbirth; these things are unavoidable. And in some places they've been wise enough to have ritual and ceremony about significant events. It is unfortunate in our culture-meaning north American mainstream culture—that all this has been minimized to the point where little girls are even afraid to say that they are starting to menstruate when they should be very happy. Grown women are afraid to say that they are approaching the menopause, when that means that they have lived a whole successful life. They've lived so long that they can have this…"

"…The characters in Sassafras did say awful things and trash one another, but there are people who do. In the time of the Sassafras narrative certain women's collectives existed that were very dramatic and people had a lot of lovers. We didn't even call it promiscuity. It was very different from the environment today. People today sit down and think about how they really want to be monogamous. It was not anybody's goal fifteen years ago."

"No. I’m not trying to go away from anybody. I don’t go where my feelings get hurt. If you’re going to be nice to me, I’ll come."

"Robert Staples sees in Ntozake Shange's play For Colored Girls "a collective appetite for black male blood." Yet it is my female children and my Black sisters who lie bleeding all around me, victims of the appetites of our brothers."

"it doesn’t matter where I live. Just give me a room to write in."

"Multiculturalism is a white people joke. Black people have always been here as different. People need to stop saying that there is one way to be–and then the issue will disappear. I don’t tell Navajos they can’t speak Navajo. I don’t tell Asians they can’t eat noodles. Because black people have refused to eat potatoes and cabbage, white people are terrified. Now that we’re saying “I’m talkin’ Zulu, I’m changin’ my name, my child’s goin’ to a black school with Muslims,” white people get upset and have to call it something. Multiculturalism isn’t about culture, it’s about power."

"I went to a concert where Ntozake Shange was reading. There, everything exploded for me. She was speaking a language that I knew-in the deepest parts of me-existed, and that I had ignored in my own feminist studies and even in my own writing. What Ntozake caught in me is the realization that in my development as a poet, I have, in many ways, denied the voice of my brown mother-the brown in me. I have acclimated to the sound of a white language which, as my father represents it, does not speak to the emotions in my poems-emotions which stem from the love of my mother. The reading was agitating. Made me uncomfortable. Threw me into a week-long terror of how deeply I was affected. I felt that I had to start all over again. That I turned only to the perceptions of white middle-class women to speak for me and all women. I am shocked by my own ignorance."

"We realized we were on our own and started bonding together, Latina women writers like Cherrie Moraga, Jewelle Gomez, black writers like Audre Lorde and Ntozake Shange, who wrote For Colored Women, we understood we had to support each other or nobody would."

"There is a line in Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enough. In the play, the woman in purple speaks after having struggled to deal with all the psychic and physical aspects of herself that the culture ignores or demeans. She sums herself up in these wise and peaceful words: “here is what i have . . ./poems/big thighs/lil tits/&/so much love”. This is the power of the body, our power, the power of the wildish woman."

"Science may carry us to Mars, but it will leave the Earth peopled as ever by the inept."

"War will pass when injustice passes. Never before, unless hope leaves the world."

"What the world asks now are state reforms and social reforms,—in other words, the reformation of our neighbours. What the Gospel asks, and has always asked, is the reformation of ourselves ... Mr. Chesterton spoke but the truth when he said that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult, and not tried."

"The sanguine assurance that men and nations can be legislated into goodness, that pressure from without is equivalent to a moral change within, needs a strong backing of inexperience. 'The will,' says Francis Thompson, 'is the lynch-pin of the faculties.' We stand or fall by its strength or its infirmity. Where there is no temptation, there is no virtue. Parental legislation for the benefit of the weak leaves them as weak as ever ... They may go to heaven in leading-strings, but they cannot conquer Apollyon on the way."

"People who pin their faith to a catchword never feel the necessity of understanding anything."

"[W]hy should our self-appointed instructors assume that because we do not chatter about a thing, we have never heard of it?"

"Had the Pilgrim Fathers been met on Plymouth Rock by immigration officials; had their children been placed immediately in good free schools, and given the care of doctors, dentists, and nurses; had they found themselves in infinitely better circumstances than they had ever enjoyed in England, indulging in undreamed-of luxuries, and taught by kind-hearted philanthropists,—what pioneer virtues would they have developed, what sons would they have bred, what honours would history have accorded them? If our early settlers were masterful, they earned the right to mastery, and the price they paid for it was endurance. To the sacrifices which they made, to their high courage and heroic labours, we owe law, liberty, and well-being."

"The necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand, and of scholarship on the other."

"It is in his pleasures that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self."

"[W]e ... know very well that we never learn unless we like our lesson, and never behave ourselves unless inspired by precept and example. The history of every nation is the heritage of its sons and daughters; and the story of its struggles, sufferings, misdeeds, and glorious atonements is the story that keeps alive in all our hearts that sentiment of patriotism, without which we are speeding swiftly on our path to national corruption and decay."

"We can reckon the cost of misdirected emotions by the price which the past has paid for them. We know the full significance of that irresponsible sympathy which ... admits no difference between attack and resistance, between a war of aggression and a war of defence; which confuses moral issues, ignores experience, and insults the intelligence of mankind. The reformer whose heart is in the right place, but whose head is elsewhere, represents a waste of force; and we can not afford any waste in the conservation of honour and goodness."

"The sentiment of to-day is social and philanthropic. ... [but] we must forever bear in mind that sentiment is subjective, and a personal thing. However exalted and however ardent, it cannot be accepted as a scale for justice, or as a test for truth."

"Poetry is for the inner ear."

"I think that my first poetic impulse is for music; second a definite conception with the ring of the universe; third clearness of exposition."

"I am still making my living reciting my verses for crowds who refuse to buy my books. I must do this, as all American rhymers must, however sick I may be of the sound of my own voice."

"Whenever I begin to write a poem or draw a picture I am, in imagination, if not in reality, back in my room where I began to draw pen-and-ink pictures and write verses in my seventeenth year. Both windows of the room look down on the great Governor’s Yard of Illinois. This yard is a square block, a beautiful park. Our house is on so high a hill I can always look down upon the governor. Among my very earliest memories are those of seeing old Governor Oglesby leaning on his cane, marching about, calling his children about him."

"I have sung my songs to my own tunes for most of the English departments of the state universities of the forty-eight states of the nation, and the English departments of other universities and colleges; and I have been recalled to many of these seven and eight times, which matters are a source of great pride to me. And I have brought out three books where the songs were based on my own pen-and-ink pictures."

"The flower-fed buffaloes of the spring In the days of long ago, Ranged where the locomotives sing And the prairie flowers lie low."

"Factory windows are always broken. Somebody's always throwing bricks, Somebody's always heaving cinders, Playing ugly Yahoo tricks."

"They gore no more, they bellow no more, They trundle around the hills no more:— With the Blackfeet, lying low, With the Pawnees, lying low, Lying low."

"Most years I owe no money and I have no money. Every university pays my way to the next town. That’s about all. No poet has ever made any money out of having his poetry published, and no poet ever will. If the fee is two hundred dollars, it is one hundred dollars for coming to town and one hundred for leaving inside of twenty-four hours. There has been no poetry in the history of the world that has made money for the poet. The New Poetry Movement began when Abel made a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain; but the sacrifice of Abel was not intended as a money-making idea. On the last great day, when Gabriel blows his trumpet, even if he blows it in sonnets, he will not do it for the money that is in it. If he does do it for the cash he will not be Gabriel and it will not be the last great day. It will be a second-rate Hollywood movie of the last great day, and business will continue as usual."

"It is portentous, and a thing of state That here at midnight, in our little town A mourning figure walks, and will not rest, Near the old court-house pacing up and down."

"Mumbo-Jumbo is dead in the jungle."

"A bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black, A famous high top-hat and plain worn shawl Make him the quaint great figure that men love, The prairie-lawyer, master of us all."

"Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room, Barrel-house kings; with feet unstable, Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table, Pounded on the table, Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom."

"Our Christmas shall be rare at dawning there, And each shall find his brother fair, Like a little child within: All hearts of the earth shall find new birth And wake, no more to sin."

"Be careful what you do, Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo, And all of the other Gods of the Congo, Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you."

"And who will bring white peace That he may sleep upon his hill again?"

"The fact that you can write verse is in itself a certificate that you can write prose."

"Booth died blind and still by faith he trod, Eyes still dazzled by the ways of God."

"Drabs from the alleyways and drug fiends pale— Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail:— Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath, Unwashed legions with the ways of Death— (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)"

"Let not our town be large, remembering That little Athens was the Muses' home, That Oxford rules the heart of London still, That Florence gave the Renaissance to Rome."

"I will not be a slave to my yesterday. I am creator, not a parrot."

"Booth led boldly with his big bass drum— (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) The Saints smiled gravely and they said: "He's come.""

"Star of my heart, I follow from afar. Sweet Love on high, lead on where shepherds are, Where Time is not, and only dreamers are. Star from of old, the Magi-Kings are dead And a foolish Saxon seeks the manger-bed. O lead me to Jehovah's child Across this dreamland lone and wild, Then will I speak this prayer unsaid, And kiss his little haloed head— "My star and I, we love thee, little child.""

"Most of the good poetry, as I have said, has appeared in pamphlet form before the poet was known to the public. It is utterly impossible to make an income from verse, and one must win his worldly standing, and earn his living some other way. One of the most distinguished of the Middle Western poets supports himself by writing a movie column once a day. I do not know a poet in the Anglo-Saxon world who makes his living by poetry. Every single one of them makes his living in some other way."

"Except the Christ be born again tonight In dreams of all men, saints and sons of shame, The world will never see his kingdom bright. Stars of all hearts, lead onward thro' the night Past death-black deserts, doubts without a name, Past hills of pain and mountains of new sin To that far sky where mystic births begin, Where dreaming ears the angel-song shall win."

"There were three great Virginia poets in the very beginning — George Washington, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson. "What!" you say. "We do not even know the names of their publishers. They were not poets!" Well, how do you know? Did you ever really read them? What do you know about it? Their very names will breathe poetry forever."

"Ammons poetry at Poetry Foundation"