A Quote by Mary Ruefle

Although all poets aspire to be birds, no bird aspires to be a poet.

Mary Ruefle

Quote Topics

Although Aspire Bird Birds Poet Poets

Quote Author

Mary Ruefle
American - Poet
Born: April 16, 1952

One of the surest tests of the superiority or inferiority of a poet is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.

T. S. Eliot

Speaking as an outsider is the most authentic voice for a poet. Poets who have one hundred thousand or one million readers [as many South Korean poets do] might not be a real, authentic poet.

Kim Hyesoon

Nearly all men and women are poetical, to some extent, but very few can be called poets. There are great poets, small poets, and men and women who make verses. But all are not poets, nor even good versifiers. Poetasters are plentiful, but real poets are rare. Education can not make a poet, though it may polish and develop one.

Orson F. Whitney

The only nice poets I've ever met were bad poets, and a bad poet is not a poet at all - ergo, I've never met a nice poet.

Richard Burton

The only birds I know about are the duck and the dove and the quail, birds that you shoot. You're not really supposed to shoot cardinals. I don't know if I'd shoot this bird. It looks pretty mean. This bird might pull a gun out and shoot right back at you.

Josh McCown

The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical - their data are in the way they sound. A poet's biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.

Joseph Brodsky

To a Young Poet Time cannot break the bird's wing from the bird. Bird and wing together Go down, one feather. No thing that ever flew, Not the lark, not you, Can die as others do.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

Anne Lamott

.. to a poet, the human community is like the community of birds to a bird, singing to each other. Love is one of the reasons we are singing to one another, love of language itself, love of sound, love of singing itself, and love of the other birds.

Sharon Olds

The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense his life. . . . The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds - how many human aspirations are realised in their free, holiday-lives - and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!

John Burroughs

Wind power, if not properly planned and sited, can harm birds and bats (although Danish studies of 10,000 bird kills revealed that almost all died in collisions with buildings, cars and wires; only 10 were killed by windmills). Alternative energy sources are absolutely necessary. Global warming will kill birds and bats, as well as other species, in much greater numbers than wind power.

David Suzuki

In days of yore, the poet's pen From wing of bird was plunder'd, Perhaps of goose, but now and then, From Jove's own eagle sunder'd. But now, metallic pens disclose Alone the poet's numbers; In iron inspiration glows, Or with the poet slumbers.

John Adams

There are still many unsolved problems about bird life, among which are the age that birds attain, the exact time at which some birds acquire their adult dress, and the changes which occur in this with years. Little, too, is known about the laws and routes of bird migration, and much less about the final disposition of the untold thousands which are annually produced.

Paul Bartsch

For me, musicians are poets. Beethoven describes himself as a poet of tones, just like Coltrane's a poet of tempo.

Cornel West

There's not a big range in the political poetry of the last year, or not a political range. On the one hand, no poet that I know of who writes in English in the United States is anything but a humanist. So all poets, including myself, seem to be under that umbrella. We just don't have Rush Limbaugh poets, Ann Coulter poets.