April is National Poetry Month. On this occasion, take words about poetry from a famous poet, or anyone else you deem fitting, and turn them into a quatrain (four-line poem). Below are four examples from poet Roy E. Peterson. Post your quatrain in the comments section below.
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Poetry is synthesis
Of powerful emotion,
Remembered in tranquility;
Spontaneous commotion.
“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” —William Wordsworth
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Poetry surprises readers
With their own highest thought
And strikes like their remembering
Something once forgot.
“Poetry should surprise by a fine excess … it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.” — John Keats, from On Axioms and the Surprise of Poetry.
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Poetry unveils the beauty
Hidden in the world.
Common objects now look strange
When beauty is unfurled.
“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley, from A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays.
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Every word has meaning.
Each adjective a place.
Never dull the image with
Superfluous words of grace.
“Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something. Don’t use such an expression as ‘dim land of peace.’ It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer’s not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstractions.” — Ezra Pound
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The muse’s H2O will have to go –
A heady flute of fizz will take its place.
For finest rhyme is only apt to flow
When Calliope is clearly off her face.
“No poems can please for long or live
that are written by water-drinkers.” ~ Horace
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A poet must expose each fraud and foe,
Kick up a stink with fires they need to stoke –
Lay bare all wickedness and worldly woe
Until it wakes the dippy, dozy Woke.
“A poet’s work is to name the un-nameable, to point at
frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world,
and stop it going to sleep.” ~ Salman Rushdie
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When you have nothing left to lose,
When all you had is dead and gone,
Your soul will seek and find your muse
To lift you in her lilting song.
“There is poetry as soon as we realize we have nothing.” ~ John Cage
“The poet’s job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name…”
–Jane Kenyon
Poetry’s emotional slop
That lands on the floor with a plop.
It’s deep and mysterious, important and serious,
And Jane Kenyon pushes the mop.
I love this one, hilarious.
LOL!
Use poetry, said Robert Frost,
To take life and to throttle it.
That’s the secret found, once lost,
To brew joy then to bottle it.
“Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.” —Robert Frost
Neat one!
Thanks, man…
I’m told what I’m told what I’m told,
A rose is a rose is a rose.
I know what I know what I know,
I go where I go where I go.
‘Rose is a rose is a rose’ in Sacred Emily by Gertrude Stein, 1913
Famous Poet Quatrain Contest Entry – SCP – April 2021
Where I go
By Robert James Liguori
Stein writes, ‘A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’,
Insight, ‘I’m told what I’m told what I’m told what I’m told’.
My plight: ‘I know what I know what I know what I know’,
So I recite, ‘I go where I go where I go where I go’.
Inspired by ‘Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’ in Sacred Emily by Gertrude Stein, 1913
What is poetry?
Can I compare, tigers burning bright to starry nights,
or fields of golden daffodils to sunflowers on a wall,
those strings of black on white that sing in perfect harmony
to still life which adorns palatial halls? Poems in different form be all.
“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”
― Leonardo da Vinci
“There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it”
― Gustave Flaubert
The seed of every poem is a feeling.
When feeling sprouts a thought, it yearns to be
Put into words to simplify revealing.
And that’s when it blooms into poetry.
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”
~ Robert Frost
Come again if but a moment
I, the doorman, a proponent
Opens, closes, if perchance
I offer you another glance
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess what is seen during a moment – Carl Sandburg
Remembrance you glance glittering rise of
Rivulet moans voice cleared the chattering
Body of bird brushing diurnal clouds
Coming down and the stars to comfort you
If the love star grows most big
By E.E. Cummings, Until his voice is more than bird.
revised:
Remembrance, you glance, glittering rise of
Rivulet moans. Voice cleared the chattering.
Body of bird brushing diurnal clouds.
Coming down and the stars to comfort you.
If the Love Star Grows Most Big by E.E. Cummings, Until his voice is more than bird.
Bills in Verse
You call a poem useless lines—
This thought should give you pause:
By words that change the people’s minds,
We poets change the laws!
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.”
Robert Frost
Addling Flood
Look at the abstract and bold, unrhymed lines;
And feel them diffract all the light of your mind,
Drowning the reader in an addling flood
(like a wild nosebleed of a poem’s lifeblood).