Poetry Quote by Roman Payne — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“In life, more than in anything else, it isn’t easy to end up alive.”

“Ô, Wanderess, Wanderess”

“I took her to bed with silk and song”

“With the need for the self in the time of another / I left my seaport grim and dear / knowing good work could be made / in the state governed by both Hope and Despair.”

“Did I live the spring I’d sought?”

“English:”

“You see how I try”

“The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail.”

“Every poem should remind the reader that they are going to die.”

“Poetry, if it has too many layers, should at least lead readers to the openings of the caves the poet built with words and then let them explore on their own! If it does not happen, the travellers might return even without knocking at all!”

“A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.”

“If you had told me, though, when I was twenty-four that I would write about Skokie, Illinois, where I grew up, I would have said, ‘You’re out of your mind. Why would I have Skokie in a poem?’ But you become resigned. Your job is to write about the life you actually have.”