A Quote by Naomi Shihab Nye

A poem is a cup of words open to the sky and wind in a bucket.

Naomi Shihab Nye

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Bucket Cup Open Poem Sky Wind Words

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Naomi Shihab Nye
American - Novelist
Born: March 12, 1952

There are parts on 'Wind's Poem' that are literal recordings of wind. I had this old sound effects record that I got some wind from and then I figured out that distorted cymbals sound just like wind so I used that a lot.

Phil Elverum

Mother loved the wind. When I was growing up, she would recite this poem to me. Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I, But when the trees bow down their heads, The wind is passing by. So it is with God.

Alice Steinbach

In a manner of speaking, the poem is its own knower, neither poet nor reader knowing anything that the poem says apart from the words of the poem.

Allen Tate

Want is a thing that unfurls unbidden like fungus, opening large upon itself, stopless, filling the sky. But needs, from one day to the next, are few enough to fit in a bucket, with room enough left to rattle like brittle brush in a dry wind.

Barbara Kingsolver

A poem makes clear without making simple. Poetry's language carries what lives outside language. It's as if you were given a 5-gallon bucket with 10 gallons of water in it. Mysterious thirsts are answered. That alchemical bucket carries secrets also, even the ones we keep from ourselves.

Jane Hirshfield

The first cup moistens my lips and throat; The second cup breaks my loneliness; The third cup searches my barren entrail but to find therein some thousand volumes of odd ideographs; The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration-all the wrongs of life pass out through my pores; At the fifth cup I am purified; The sixth cup calls me to the realms of the immortals. The seventh cup-ah, but I could take no more! I only feel the breath of the cool wind that raises in my sleeves. Where is Elysium? Let me ride on this sweet breeze and waft away thither.

Lu Tong

When words become a poem, it makes sense to me, but I don't know how to explain to someone why the words are the way they are. It's just the logic of the poem to me.

Sarah Kay

The old oaken bucket, the iron-bound bucket, The moss-covered bucket, which hung in the well.

Samuel Woodworth

Bucket filling is in the eye of the bucket holder, not the bucket filler. Fill their buckets with things that are important to them ... not you.

David Cottrell

The difference between 'lighght' and another type of poem with more words is that it doesn't have a reading process. Even a five-word poem has a beginning, middle, and end. A one-word poem doesn't. You can see it all at once. It's instant.

Aram Saroyan

Seek not for fresher founts afar, Just drop your bucket where you are; And while the ship right onward leaps, Uplift it from the exhaustless deeps. Parch not your life with dry despair; The stream of hope flow everywhere-- So under every sky and star, Just drop your bucket where you are.

Sam Walter Foss

I approach writing a poem in a much different state than when I am writing prose. It's almost as if I were working in a different language when I'm writing poetry. The words - what they are and what they can become - the possibilities of the words are vastly expanded for me when I'm writing a poem.

Pattiann Rogers

In a poem, the words happen; they just come. I let them. Otherwise, I wouldn't write. To interfere with what is happening is to distort the poem. Just a very small degree of intelligence and supervision is necessary. Very tactful. Any revision later that violates the text as it came, that begins rewriting the words, is fake.

Louis Dudek

Up from the sea, the wild north wind is blowing, under the sky's gray arch. Smiling, I watch the shaken elm boughs, knowing It is the wind of March.

John Greenleaf Whittier

In blue Light nature space the whole world, wide grazing land, the open spaces wind across the land and the sky, blue, high

Nils-Aslak Valkeapaa

The religion of the short poem, in every age and in every literature, has a single commandment: Less is always more. The short poem rejects preamble and summary. It's about all and everything, the metaphysics of a few words surrounded by much silence. …The short poem is a match flaring up in a dark universe.

Charles Simic

A Quote by Naomi Shihab Nye

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