Quotes by Paul Engle

“Verse is not written, it is bled; Out of the poets abstract head. Words drip the poem on the page; Out of his grief, delight and rage.”

“Poets dont draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.”

“A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds”

“A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back into his homeland.”

“Writing is like this-you dredge for the poems meaning the way police dredge for a body. They think it is down there under the black water, they work the grappling hooks back and forth.”

“Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.”

“But maybe its up in the hills under the leaves or in a ditch somewhere. Maybe its never found. But what you find, whatever you find, is always only part of the missing, and writing is the way the poet finds out what it is he found.”

“Wisdom is knowing when you cant be wise.”

“All poetry is an ordered voice, one which tries to tell you about a vision in the unvisionary language of farm, city and love.”

A barn with cattle and horses is the place to begin Christmas; after all, thats where the original event happened, and that same smell was the first air that the Christ Child breathed.

The sharpest memory of our old-fashioned Christmas eve is my mothers hand making sure I was settled in bed.

All families had their special Christmas food. Ours was called Dutch Bread, made from a dough halfway between bread and cake, stuffed with citron and every sort of nut from the farm - hazel, black walnut, hickory, butternut.

Every Christmas should begin with the sound of bells, and when I was a child mine always did. But they were sleigh bells, not church bells, for we lived in a part of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where there were no churches.

Wisdom is knowing when you cant be wise.

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.