Fragment Friday - The Quote Edition

(To Max and Merlin) "Nah, nah, can't catch me."

10 quotes by 10 of my favorite poets to wrap up April and National Poetry Month. 

1.  " I don’t want my relationship to poetry to be dutiful. Poetry is not obligatory, it’s not work. It’s an inner request far subtler and deeper than that."

Jane Hirshfield

2.  "Achievement brings its own anticlimax."

Maya Angelou

3.  “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” 

W.B. Yeats

4.  "Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does."

Allen Ginsberg

5.  "Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning of the world itself."

Seamus Heaney

6.  "To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go."

Mary Oliver

7.  “I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.” 

Pablo Neruda

8.  “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.” 

Robert Frost

9.  "For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography."

Robert Penn Warren

10.  “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.” 

Louise Glück