The Best Poets
The best poets
Are not born yet;
Come to Africa,
America, Asia.
There are poets
Of old; renown,
Yet there are
More unknown.
Wordsworth and
Shakespeare differs;
Soyinka and Clark
Are philoshers.
Prose, poetry,
And photography
Are all seperate things
But they paint the world,
And immortalise memory,
Yet leave the observer
Out in oblivion.
But invention
Was no intention,
To kill out oblivion.
They shall forget them
At the end.
poem by Efe Benjamin
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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Related quotes
The Best Poets [Reprise]
The best poets are not born yet
Come to Africa, America, Asia;
There are poets of old; renown
Yet there are more unknown.
.
Wordsworth and Shakespeare differs
Soyinka and Clark are philosophers
Don't confuse Religion with Church
They are two seperate things
If no, you can tax your memory
Religion is our belief and how we
communicate with our God
God, our maker made us out of his own love.
But if that love has so deluded us
Then somthing must have gone wrong.
Today, the Church has become more of a business venture;
Pastors now fly on private jets;
Hungry children can't be fed.
.
Poetry, philosophy, and photography
Are all seperate things
If no, you can still ask your memory
They immortalize special moments
And leave the observer out in oblivion
But invention was no intention
to kill out oblivion
At the end, we shall forget them.
For this world is perfectly unfair.
.
Have you yet not heard?
The incidence that happened in Aluu
A community predominated by fools
Four innocent students were burnt
to their deaths
Right before their eyes they were made
to experience their worst fears; hell
Who said there should be another hell
after death?
Then God is not as merciful as they said
But that is not end of what I've said;
Four students were not given a chance
to prove their innocence;
In a matter of munites, that community
head had decided;
- Four innocents must be executed;
- Four innocents must be uncladded
- Four innocents must be bludgeoned
to their deaths
- Four innocents, must be burnt like I've said.
.
That day, angels wept
I never knew Lucifer could shed a tear.
Positions of leadership must not be
given to imbeciles,
For they will take their own anu*s
And use it to decide.
For how long will Nigeria
be cursed with its leaders?
This, I do not know
And Hell, well, Heaven, I still don't get it yet.
.
When I said the Church will steal
your money
I know hipocrites will say I'm greedy
But yet, you can still ask your memory
Who said my God is hungry
He has all to His means in Heavenly
Millions of angels at His bidding
Those alms should go to the needy
I mean the once who are hungry.
.
I have said times and times over time
I detest lines that rhyme
It gives too much humour to my thoughts
And my thoughts should be serious
Even tho' I now sound derilious.
.
When I said man have killed his God
I only meant man have killed his love
And love itself is an embodiment of our God
Without that love there would be no world.
.
O' dear uncle Hesiod
Who gave thou authority to keep Zeus
in Olympus
His world was ruled by his own sexual lust.
.
Listen, fellow Biafrans
They had won that war with our own
starvation.
Who said battles should be won
at the expense of others sorrows?
Together we pray and hope for a better tomorrow.
.
I had not asked God to give me a break
But today His world is ruled by hate.
If his world was made from love
Why did He bring Lucifer upon us?
.
Religion has become a bane of mankind
Love, in heart of man you can't find;
- Pastors will always ask for tithe;
- Bigots will always start a fight;
- Leaders will always tell a lie;
- Life is so frought with strife;
- Christ will always be by our side;
But then, we always walk out of His sight.
.
Where are those that call us black
monkeys?
They have come and gone with our
oil and money
But I swear I have also seen a white monkey.
.
Poems have been written by men
and women who carry
great thoughts with them,
These thoughts would suppress
And choke them to their deaths
Till they write it out in form of poems,
These people, they are, I call them poets.
poem by Efe Benjamin
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For All The Poets
FOR ALL THE POETS
This is a poem for all the poets who have no name,
For all those who have written and failed,
And for those who have not written,
And failed.
This is a poem for all the poets who dreamed themselves poets,
And were never, and will be known as poets
To the world.
This a poem for all those
Who after years of effort
Still live in an oblivion
They will die in.
This is a poem for all those
Who whether they have poetry in them or not,
Will never be heard or read,
For what their hearts must tell
Someone else.
This is a poem for all the silent poets
Those who live in silence
And whose silence is eternal
For all those whose only poetry
is the poem they have lived within themselves.
This is a poem for all those who would- be poets
And a poem for those
Who despite their efforts
Did not make their poem known.
This is a poem which may be for you,
And I know is for me
A confession
To make us less alone.
poem by Shalom Freedman
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There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
quote by Eugenio Montale
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.
quote by James Broughton
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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quotes From Poets On Poetry
** QUOTES FROM POETS ON
POETRY
The great Shakespeare in his ‘A Midsummer
Night’s Dream’,
Speaks of poetry as ‘forms of things unknown,
The poet’s pen turns them to shape,
And gives to airy nothing a local habitation
and a name’!
John Ashbery had always felt, that ‘poetry
all the time goes on in his head’, -
And ‘occasionally he snips off a length’!
For Coleridge, ‘prose is arrangement of words
in their best order’,
But ‘poetry is the best words in their best order’!
For Paul Engle, poetry is ‘ordinary language
raised to the N-th power’,
While for William Wordsworth it is a continuous
shower, -
And ‘a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,
Of emotions recollected in tranquility’, - is fairly
healing!
Shelley in his ‘Defense of Poetry’ sincerely felt,
That ‘poetry lifts the veil, from the hidden beauty
of the world’,
Making ‘the familiar objects be as if they were
not familiar’!
While Carl Sandburg speaks of poetry as, -
‘The journal of a sea animal living on land,
Wanting to fly in the air’, - as high as it possibly
can!
Robert Graves declared rather candidly, -
That ‘if there’s no money in poetry’, one need
not feel sorry,
Since there is ‘neither any poetry in money’!
I conclude with Robert Frost, who always felt,
That writing a ‘poem is discovering as he
progressed’,
Since for him, ‘poetry never had a pre-meditated
end’!
-Raj Nandy
New Delhi
26 Feb 09
(** The words of our famous poets/authors, have
been placed in ‘inverted commas’.)
Good Poets and Bad Poets
Some poets get awards and think they are good poets.
Some poets never get awards and think they are bad poets.
Some poets think they are good poets only in their own mind
Some poets think they are bad poets in somebody's else mind.
Some poets think they are good poets in somebody else mind.
Some poets think others think they are good poets but they don't in their hearts.
Some poets think they are good poets in their hearts but not in anyone else's mind.
All are insecure, except those who get security from the opinions of others and that, alas, doesn't last and isn't real.
Some poets have left the entire scene and live only in their mind.
Some poets take criticism and don't mind.
Some poets avoid criticism and do mind.
Some poets write poetry to get love.
Some poets love to write poetry.
Some poets are ahead of their time, in their mind
Some poets spend a lifetime feeling like failures in their mind
Some poets live only after they die.
Some poets have much to say but can't articulate
Some poets retreat, believing others don't understand
So which one of these am I?
I guess I am all of these and none of these
and no matter what my description
I intend to keep doing what I do:
Write. Right
poem by Lonnie Hicks
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There Are A Few Poets
THERE ARE A FEW POETS
There are a few poets
Beyond the poetry you and I know
And are capable of –
There are a few poets
Who seem to write a poetry
Which is Poetry itself,
A Poetry which is everything Poetry should be-
Those poets are somewhere else
On a level far beyond any we can hope to reach-
They are Poetry –
And we we are the little listeners and readers
Who can in awe and praise worship
What we ourselves will forever be incapable of.
poem by Shalom Freedman
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0005 Totally Boring Poem
I’m totally bored by:
poems that sound like other poems
poems that try to sound unlike any other poems
poets who never take risks
poets who think that taking risks
makes them good poets
poems with 'meaning'
poems with no meaning
poets who slag off other poets
as if that achieves something
poets that tell you that rhyme
is not for an age but for all time
poets that tell you that rhyme is outmoded and boring
poets who think that the poetry of 'the past'
is greater than that of 'the present'
poets who think that the poetry of 'the present'
is greater than that of 'the past'
poems that tell you the poet's the first to discover sex
poets that tell you they’re the best sex you’ll ever have
although you’ll never meet them to find out
poets that tell you they’ve been dumped
poets who've never known love and being dumped
poets who are ambitious
poets who are unambitious
poets who tell you all about higher things
poets who reject higher things
poets who think life’s just a joke
poets who think life’s no joke
poets who sit on the fence
poets who have no sense of balance
poets who despise 'the middle ground'
poets who talk about technique
poets with no technique
poets who just throw down their thoughts
poets who 'work up' their poems to a self-satisfied polish
poets who list what they like (who cares?)
poets who list what don’t like (who cares?)
poets who write about extreme states
poets who think they’re immune to extreme states
poets who tell you why they’re bored
poets who have opinions
poets who seem to have no opinions at all
poets who have boring opinions to air - why choose poetry?
poets who comment on others' poems
as if it's the last word
poets who never bother to comment
on others' poems
poets who don't love poetry passionately
poets who tell you they 'love poetry passionately'
poets who – oh I’m too bored to go on reading this,
how about you?
I suppose you have boring opinions too?
another time perhaps
and oh yes I'm most of all bored by
those who waste their precious time on this earth
being bored
well I feel better for that.
how about you?
poem by Michael Shepherd
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Poets of Great Renown
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
and William Wordsworth were
eighteenth-nineteenth Century
British Poets of renown...
they collaborated in fine
lyrical ballad style, both
loving the rhythm and rhyme
of Shakespeare, his sonnets
and his plays.
In seventeen ninety six
Wordsworth and Coleridge met,
becoming 'poetry' friends,
but sadly with time their
friendship ended.
I quote just four lines from their
lengthy poem of imagination..
The Ancient Mariner.
'He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small
For the dear God who loveth us
He made ~ and loveth all'
poem by Joyce Hemsley
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Dear Lorca
Dear Lorca,
These letters are to be as temporary as our poetry is to be permanent. They will establish the bulk, the wastage that my sour-stomached contemporaries demand to help them swallow and digest the pure word. We will use up our rhetoric here so that it will not appear in our poems. Let it be consumed paragraph by paragraph, day by day, until nothing of it is left in our poetry and nothing of our poetry is left in it. It is precisely because these letters are unnecessary that they must be written.
In my last letter I spoke of the tradition. The fools that read these letters will think by this we mean what tradition seems to have meant lately—an historical patchwork (whether made up of Elizabethan quotations, guide books of the poet’s home town, or obscure bits of magic published by Pantheon) which is used to cover up the nakedness of the bare word. Tradition means much more than that. It means generations of different poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem, gaining and losing something with each transformation—but, of course, never really losing anything. This has nothing to do with calmness, classicism, temperament, or anything else. Invention is merely the enemy of poetry.
See how weak prose is. I invent a word like invention. These paragraphs could be translated, transformed by a chain of fifty poets in fifty languages, and they still would be temporary, untrue, unable to yield the substance of a single image. Prose invents—poetry discloses.
A mad man is talking to himself in the room next to mine. He speaks in prose. Presently I shall go to a bar and there one or two poets will speak to me and I to them and we will try to destroy each other or attract each other or even listen to each other and nothing will happen because we will be speaking in prose. I will go home, drunken and dissatisfied, and sleep—and my dreams will be prose. Even the subconscious is not patient enough for poetry.
You are dead and the dead are very patient.
Love,
Jack
poem by Jack Spicer
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I Lost The Music Of My Poetry
I LOST THE MUSIC OF MY POETRY
I lost the music of my poetry
I tried to hear it again
In old lines of my own,
Or in the lines of more musical poets-
Tehillim and Kohleth
Stevens and Keats, Hopkins Wordsworth and Dickinson-
Shakespeare-
But I heard no music of my own
Perhaps I have never really had
A music of my own.
Perhaps all I have had
Is what I have here-
Short lines of prose
Which also have their rhythm-
But are not true poems
And certainly do not sing together
As my soul would.
poem by Shalom Freedman
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Our Poetry Critics
Our poetry critics ageing males on saturday evenings from six to nine
Meet at the literary room of the Lions Club to do what suits them fine
To talk of poetry and poets each to their point of view
Though they agree on one thing that good poets only few.
Well educated gents of course and they could not be rude
But contemporary rhyme poets only poetasters and them they exclude
From their talk of poets and poetry and in their literary knowledge they take pride
And who is or who is not a poet seems their right to decide.
They never talk about bush poets such verse they see as slipshod
And they see them as the children of the lesser poetry god
And for their years in Uni they have their degrees to show
And of poets and of poetry so much they think they know.
To them a poem is not a poem unless it reads like prose
And a ballad different from true verse as a weed is from a rose
And true poets only write for the privileged few that's what they do imply
And never for the ordinary, people like you and I.
Our poetry critics at the Lions they meet on saturday
And who is a good poet and what is a good poem each like to have their say
And if you wish to become a member of their club you must have your Uni Degrees
For if not to them you are not qualified for to talk about poetry.
poem by Francis Duggan
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A Fun Or Fate Poetry Writing?
Poetry writing has become a matter of fun!
With play of words many indulge in this fun;
Fun without fact will make poetry quite inept.
Fun or fate, some write poetry with true fact!
There are many things for them to have fun,
But it has become easy to play in poetry sites.
Also there are comments, voting and ranking;
These make them play this game regularly!
Fact is some are born poets in these sites also!
It is quite true some become poets sooner here!
Also it happens that some are branded as poets!
So goes the survival of these sites by this fun!
No poetry can survive long without fun and fact;
Fun or fate, poetry has become a part of life ever!
poem by Ramesh T A
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Memory and Oblivion
When all is lost, there is still a memory
From which a new city can be built in a new world.
Those with memory will be wealthy.
Oblivion cures the old wounds, and you must agree,
There is only the past and the future on the path;
When all is lost, there is still a memory.
Memory will save oblivion from a bad reverie;
When the new city is built, it will be an abode,
Bestowed by those with memory to make others wealthy.
Before the temple, in the middle of the city,
Keepers of the fire all abided.
When all is lost, there is still a memory.
Fire will be born from night to be
New light when all knowledge is swallowed
And those with memory will be wealthy.
A new rose will bloom from the dark sea,
A city revived from memory and abroad;
When all is but a memory, there is still memory.
Those with memory will be wealthy.
poem by Dejan Stojanovic
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The Town Poets
They have the ticket draw for the football club
But never a poets hour at the local pub
'Twould seem that cricket and football are the in thing
And horse racing at the back end of the Spring
But of course the Town poets have their own poetry night
On saturday evenings at the bowling club rooms their poems they recite
The local lovers of poetry their night out enjoy
To watch local favourite poets such as Rina, Kate and Roy
Reciting their poetry and strutting their stuff
It cannot be said of them not quite good enough
Quite talented poets the tops of the Town
Young poets in their thirties who dream of renown
And recite their poems in the rooms of the bowling club
Whilst it's a different scene at the Town's biggest pub.
poem by Francis Duggan
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We As Poets
We as poets must command a sacred accent over a language of our choice,
We as poets must gift the minds of a failing generation,
We as poets must demand a clear explanation and a fair occupation,
We as poets must dissolve into particles and dust if we have not known enough,
We as poets must destroy the living standards of low quality,
We are to be the poetry of utmost perception and suffering.
poem by Naveed Akram
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Poetry That Belongs Only To Poets
POETRY THAT BELONGS ONLY TO POETS
Poetry that belongs only to other poets
Is not the highest poetry-
The highest poetry speaks to all
Who can hear and read it-
Let the specialists play their formal tricks for educated sophistry
The poets who speak to us
Are heard in the most simple heart.
poem by Shalom Freedman
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No Name #3
We arrived too late
Our mouths were opening
I turned off the light
So come on night
You're a witness you
You've seen me interrupt
A good old fashioned fight
So come on night
Everyone is gone
Home to oblivion
Home to oblivion
Home to oblivion
Watched the dying day
Blushing in the sky
Everyone is uptight
So come on night
Everyone is gone
Home to oblivion
Home to oblivion
Home to oblivion
I know we're not
Illegitimate
In our hearing
So come on
So come on night
song performed by by Elliott Smith
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Potential Poetry!
Love has no fear whatsoever in the world;
Poet does all by his love of all matters here;
Poetry is inspiring words of poet for all!
What's not possible by poetry is nothing!
Impossible is expressed in possible words
Making unknown known by poetry only!
Forms and style are poets own creations;
Poetry is ever new in expression of ideas
Inspiring all to be enthusiastic, enlightened!
Love of Nature, life, beauty and love poetry
Explores always deep to express truth new!
Poets are gods of Earth to men to new realm!
Poetry briefly converges all in a nutshell
As powerful as atomic energy in control!
poem by Ramesh T A
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Oblivion
it's real sick
the state of the world today
it's real thick
to come up and find a way
solution
the next time you're alone
you can
create a world of your own
make it magic
give it love
make it all you're dreaming of
everybody
in my underwear
sometimes I visit there
oblivion
ignorance is bliss
don't know nothing but this
oblivion
forget
bounce from right to left
here with the broken hearted
let's get this party started
lalalalalala
I eat my marimbas
oblivion
I tingle when I sing
bling bling bling ting ting
oblivion
forget
bounce from right to left
here with the broken hearted
let's get this party started
it's tempting to pack up your throne
move in
make this magic place your home
but nobody else can go
you'll be forever all alone
forget
bounce from right to left
no longer broken hearted and I don't know when it started
oblivion
song performed by by Macy Gray from The ID
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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