The Great Poetry ~Express Yourself Contest  June 24, 2009 - July 24, 2009

Express yourself with poetry~ for this contest I will allow 4 entries of anykind of poetry in any form, freestyle prose or rhyme..any metre or no meter,it simply doesn't matter~ on any emotion, or subject matter~ 20 awards given out and the contest will last 1 month,you may wish to look at the list of poet quotes below and draw inspiration from them or simply have your own inspirational thoughts~What is poetry? Must it be understood, or meerly enjoyed just for the reading of its beauty~ You can enter verses /poems already written or make new ones up~ just go fo it ,be creative and by all means hae fun!!

List of Poet Quotes:
Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~Leonard Cohen

Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. ~Kahlil Gibran

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
~Mark Strand, "Eating Poetry," Reasons for Moving, 1968

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either. ~Robert Graves, 1962 interview on BBC-TV, based on a very similar statement he overheard around 1955

Poetry is what gets lost in translation. ~Robert Frost

He who draws noble delights from sentiments of poetry is a true poet, though he has never written a line in all his life. ~George Sand, 1851

Always be a poet, even in prose. ~Charles Baudelaire, "My Heart Laid Bare," Intimate Journals, 1864

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. ~Eli Khamarov, The Shadow Zone

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. ~Carl Sandburg, Poetry Considered

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted. ~Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, 1821

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. ~Plato, Ion

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. ~W.B. Yeats

Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse... the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars. ~Aristotle, On Poetics

Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. ~Carl Sandburg

Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. ~John Keats

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee.
~Emily Dickinson


The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem." ~Robert Penn Warren, "The Themes of Robert Frost," Hopwood Lecture, 1947

A poem begins with a lump in the throat. ~Robert Frost

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of Nature. ~Augustus William Hare

ever been kidnapped
by a poet
if i were a poet
i'd kidnap you
put you in my phrases and meter....
~Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni, Jr., "kidnap poem"

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. ~Percy Byshe Shelley

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose. ~Samuel McChord Crothers, "Every Man's Natural Desire to Be Somebody Else" The Dame School of Experience, 1920

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is. ~James Branch Cabell

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul." ~Soren Kierkegaard

Fran Marie

Paris, KY

56 Contestants
188 Submissions
1549 Views
Created Jun 24, 2009