Some Quotes About Poetry for National Poetry Month

My favorite way to start a new poetry class is by having students read aloud a miscellaneous gathering of quotes about poetry. Once we invite all these ideas about poetry into the room—the lofty ones and the technical ones, the ancient ones and the contemporary ones—we can set about the task of discovering what a poem is for us.

As we wrap up National Poetry Month, I thought I’d share some of those quotes in the poetry box, shaking things up a little. For the record, when I ask students which quote is their favorite, inevitably someone chooses Leonard Cohen and heads around the room start nodding. Truth: I still don’t really know what that quote means.

What’s your favorite quote about poetry?

“Poetry has been eating all my problems.”

"What Issa Heard" by David Budbill

Sometimes when there’s so much clamoring for our attention, it’s nice to have a simple, straightforward poem to offer us clarity. Here then is David Budbill’s little gift of a poem and its echoes of Japanese haiku master Issa, whose portrait I included in the box.

“Two hundred years ago Issa heard the morning birds
singing sutras to this suffering world.”

Spring Poems by Ross Gay and Billy Collins

Several weeks back I got to see Ross Gay read at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center, one of those readings where the whole audience was so swept up in the poetry and the poet that we could have sat all night and listened. I raced to put more of his words in the poetry box and excerpted his “Sorrow Is Not My Name” for the start of spring. Well, a little late.

And soon it was time to swap him out. As I pored through options, I stumbled on this Billy Collins poem. Today we had one of those days Collins writes of. A friend and I had lunch on the patio of a Mexican restaurant and then stood as we said goodbye just taking in the perfection of the afternoon—blue skies and soft breeze and trees all greening out. It was what Chris’s uncle would call a “10-er.”

Here's to a season of 10-ers and neighbors who sing like angels. Happy Spring.

“And to boot,
there are, on this planet alone, something like two
million naturally occurring sweet things,”

— Ross Gay, "Sorrow Is Not My Name"

"At the train station" by Brianna Cheng

It’s been a winter of coyotes here on our little hill. The neighborhood listserv has been flooded with sightings. A lone coyote, clearly a nursing mother, trots up and down the street in broad daylight. At dusk we hear a pack yipping and howling, an eerie din rising from the brush near six-lane Riverside Drive. These urban coyotes are nothing new—here and elsewhere—but they still come as a shock. And a reminder that wildness is never that far away.

I discovered this poem through the lovely Chris at Firefly Creative Writing, whose newsletters always offer wisdom and balm alongside their (fabulous!) class offerings. I’d love this poem even if I didn’t have coyotes roaming my street. But because I do, I knew my neighbors would love it too.

“and passengers looked up from their thermoses
swallowing surprise as if
all the world was holding their breath”

"The Patience of Ordinary Things" by Pat Schneider

Our year started off with a lot of movement – Chris gone while I was home, me gone while Chris was home. Finally we’re together in one place for a stretch, and I’m grateful for the comforting normalcies of everyday life with our everyday things. Or, as Pat Schneider names them in this week’s poem, our “ordinary things.”

Last night, cleaning up after dinner, Chris said, “Your mug is at the front of the cabinet,” knowing exactly which one I would reach for in the morning. And this morning, the sky brighter than it was even yesterday, I found it there waiting for me.

“It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea”

"The Best Poem Ever" by Brian Doyle

I loved Brian Doyle’s writing from the first time I read it, and I admire the deep sense of humanity and spirit infused in it. One sadness in his early death is that we don’t get more of his quirkily beautiful essays and poems. (If you don’t know him, try this or this or all of these.)

In this sweet poem, Doyle offers us a child’s voice arguing for the poetry that exists beyond the words we give to it. It’s got me looking around for those poems.

Last night I went shell crafting with my mom in the community center where I took dance lessons as a kid. There were plenty of poems in that room where people turned shells—big and tiny, white and pink and aqua and striped—into flowers, sometimes mounting them into bouquets. But maybe the poem without words existed in the intention with which they bent over the shells, glue guns in hand, imagining them into something new.

Or maybe I’m just trying once again to give language to what doesn’t require it. What wordless poems are in the air of your life this week?

“Maybe there are a lot of poems that you can’t write
Down. Couldn’t that be?”

"Torn Map" by Naomi Shihab Nye

This morning, apropos of nothing, I was thinking of a time 25 years ago when my friend Chuck and I were in my car in Cincinnati. Where had we gone? I have no idea. But on the way home we needed to make a detour, and I handed Chuck my map of the city, torn in half right down the middle. So really, I handed him two maps, one west and one east. Chuck was dumbfounded. But on we drove, crisscrossing back and forth from one map to the other as we wound our way south.

Some months later when I prepared to leave Cincinnati, Chuck gave me the perfect going-away gift: a laminated map of Austin. It rode with me for years, until eventually Google took its place. But I still have it, and it’s still in one piece.

Here's a poem from Naomi Shihab Nye that takes the torn map to metaphorical places. It’s from her book Come with Me: Poems for a Journey, a book for children that still has plenty to say to us adults with all that we know now of time and distance.

“Now all the roads
ended in water.”

"Mornings at Blackwater" by Mary Oliver

Last week I participated in a workshop titled Dreaming Big in 2024, that led to me gluing favorite quotes and images on a piece of blue posterboard and committing to early mornings in my studio again. Hello, January.

The facilitator opened the session with this poem by Mary Oliver, one I’d never read before. Like many of Oliver’s poems, it offers an instruction, one ideally suited for the turn of a calendar.

I hope you’ll find yourself drinking with gusto from that metaphorical pond this year. And I hope at least once that you’ll refer to yourself as a “darling citizen” too.

“the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is”

"I Am Running into the New Year" by Lucille Clifton

Happy 2024, friends! Lucille Clifton is graciously back in the poetry box to accompany us into the new year. Wishing you health, peace, laughter, community, and poems.

“i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind”

"Gathering" by Nina Bagley

I chose this poem as a tip of the hat to the time of year when there tend to be more things coming in than going out. Accumulate can be such an uncomfortable word, whereas gather has such grace. To gather in this poem is to move through the world with a kind of reverence. I found the poem in the book The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal, but I quickly discovered that it is posted many places on the internet where artists are given to collecting—to create something new and to hold onto our days, which pass so quickly.

Speaking of which, there will be one more poem before 2023 is behind us. Thanks for joining me on this ride through the poems that shaped my year.

“bits of shells not whole but lovely
in their brokenness”

"The Lesson of the Falling Leaves" by Lucille Clifton

This week’s selection is a tiny, gentle poem by the ever-masterful Lucille Clifton. (If I could only put one poet in the poetry box going forward, Lucille Clifton would be high on my list.) I like sliding small poems in the box, as they are so friendly to a brief pause while walking by.

Here in Central Texas, this poem is timely. While other places get their first snows, we finally have crisp blue days and bits of color in the trees. My front yard is strewn with elm leaves. Things shift. I find myself wanting to offer a prompt to go with this gem of a poem: Write about a time when letting go was love.

Happy Late Autumn to you.

“the leaves believe
such letting go is love”

"Between Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice, Today" by Emily Jungmin Yoon

So we find ourselves in that suspended time between fall and winter, technically still in autumn, but with the days shortening and the weather getting colder. Over the weekend we sang songs around a firepit with friends, saw pics of another friend’s dog romping in her town’s first snow. In the U.S., one big holiday is behind us and the next ones line up before us.

On Saturday a group of Free Minds writers and I used Emily Jungmin Yoon’s poem as a way of writing our way into the present moment, hanging on her litany of “today” and “today.” We are neither back in September nor ahead in December, but here, now, in whatever todays we make in the in-between.

“Today my heart wears you like curtains. Today
it fills with you. ”

"Rosalynn" by Jimmy Carter

After the news of Rosalynn Carter’s death yesterday, my friend Christine posted on Facebook this poem of Jimmy Carter’s from his 2005 book, Always a Reckoning and Other Poems. Christine was lucky enough to meet the Carters at a friend’s wedding in Plains, Georgia, years ago.

We could have a nice conversation about a former president who writes poems, but this posting is for Rosalynn, who was an advocate for women’s rights, for mental health, and for creating what she called “a more caring society.” In her 77-year marriage there is much to be learned about partnership and what it means to live a good life.

Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate.

“I’d glow when her diminished voice would clear
my muddled thoughts...”

"In November" by Lisel Mueller

I spent last weekend in a narrative medicine workshop in New York City. One of the poems we discussed there was by Lisel Mueller, a poet I love but don’t spend enough time with. In that poem, the artist Monet refuses an operation to change his eyesight. In this poem, one that seems perfect for this season and this moment, a speaker who is not so famous or celebrated wonders about what makes her life unfold in one way while others’ lives unfold in different ways. The wind isn’t howling here in Austin, but some of the questions remain the same.

“Whatever was bound to happen
in my story did not happen.
But I know there are rules that cannot be broken.”

"Adrift" by Mark Nepo

One of the things I’ve noted over these years of sharing poetry is that so many poems wrestle with the same themes, especially this: how to honor and celebrate the world while also being conscious and attentive to pain and suffering. In his poem “Adrift,” spiritual teacher Mark Nepo names this paradox directly. This October, with its terrible news and bright autumn color, has been beauty and sadness, sadness and beauty, all the way through.

“This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. ”

"The Night Migrations" by Louise Glück

When Louise Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020, I was so excited to share one of her poems in the poetry box. I love her poetry, but the more I looked at her dark and elliptical work, the further it seemed from something I’d post on the curb. I think she’d appreciate that, actually. Even her response to winning the prize was a kind of complaint.

But when she died last week at the age of 80, I tried again. And here is “The Night Migrations.” These are dark days, and Louise Gluck deserves the floor.

“these things we depend on,
they disappear”

"First Fall" by Maggie Smith

It was the weekend when the heat finally released us in Austin and people opened windows and flooded the garden stores. It was the weekend when war erupted in Israel and the photos of the missing filled our computer screens. To try to hold all of that at once, plus all of the other things happening in our lives, seems to me the trick of being human.

This morning I put this poem by Maggie Smith in the poetry box, a sort of companion piece to her well-known poem “Good Bones,” which offers us a difficult world that just possibly might be made better. In this poem I feel the complexity of this ever-shifting world and the tenderness of loving and teaching each other through it all.

“The first time you see
something die, you won’t know it might
come back.”

"Plenty" by Kevin Connolly (an excerpt)

A neighbor invited us over tonight for a celebration of Sukkot, the Jewish holiday after Yom Kippur that marks a time to “rejoice in God’s bounty.” The neighbors’ children love to come up our street to check out the poetry box, so I thought I’d bring a poem along with our potluck side dish.

I turned to my friend Adam, who has the dual credentials of being both a poet and the husband of a rabbi. “Plenty” is the first poem that came to mind for him, and it’s just right. It can feel hard to find beauty at the tail end of a hot, dry, difficult summer in Austin, but this poem argues that beauty is all around us even so. Happy Sukkot to those who are celebrating.

Behind the sky there’s a storm

on the way, which, with your luck,

will be a beautiful storm

"September" by Linda Pastan

Because I was traveling, it feels like I’ve lived several versions of September already: a September of misty green hillsides, a September of shaping my mouth around the sounds of Spanish, a September of crowded airports, a September where we’re grateful that the highs in Austin are less than 100 at last, though Chris still looked at me today and said, “I am ready for this summer to be over.”

This gentle little poem from Linda Pastan’s series titled “The Months” captures the in-betweenness of September, the not-quite summer, not-quite fall feeling of suspension that finds us waiting—and wishing—for what comes next.

“the way the green
leaves cling
to their trees
in the strange heat”

"The Laughing Heart" by Charles Bukowski

We installed the poetry box three years ago this September, and it’s offered such a rich form of connection and also plenty of surprises – a car coming up the street to idle in front while someone grabbed a poem, the way e.e. cummings spoke to a neighbor, a front porch visit from the poetry box maker himself. 

This week’s surprise is Charles Bukowski, whom I would have never expected to find his way into the box with all his boozy combativeness. Also a surprise: I found the poem through the newsletter for an heirloom bean company that I love (and am ever an evangelist for). I’m going to be away for a few weeks and don’t have poems ready to go while I’m gone. So it'll be Bukowski seeing us through.

“you can’t beat death
but you can beat death in life, sometimes.”