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“Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.”
― Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

“E Pluribus Unum
The United States of America (USA)
Is a meeting place
For peoples of varied backgrounds.

And from the Great Plains of Nebraska and Wyoming
To Maryland's Eastern Shore.

From the Great Lakes adjacent Minnesota,
To the Everglades of Southern Florida.

We are one.

From the corals
Off of California's coasts.

To the mountains
Of the Shenandoah, in Virginia.

We are one.

From the steel and concrete towers
Of New York City
To Liberty Bell
In Pennsylvania.

We are One.

Out of many:
A
single,
We've become.

Out of many:
A
single;

We are one.

As the many stones that make the Obelisk In Washington,
Many individuals
Make the United States Of America.
And the best of all the world
Is here with us.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr., The Pursuit of Happiness: A Book of Poems Honoring Our American Values

“YOUR WORDS ARE MADE OF THE AIR I BREATHE.”
― Amy King

“*Providence*

The United States
Has a specific and certain purpose
On Earth.

Each American
Has a specific and certain purpose
In America.

God favors our endeavors.
And we favor God.

This,
my brother, George Washington
Referred to as providence.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr., The Pursuit of Happiness: A Book of Poems Honoring Our American Values

“Tell this to ladies: how a hero man
Assail a thick and scandalous giant
Who casts true shadow in the sun,
And die, but play no truant.

This is more horrible: that the darling egg
Of the chosen people hatch a creature
Of noblest mind and powerful leg
Who cannot fathom nor perform his nature.”
― John Crowe Ransom, The Complete Poems Of John Crowe Ransom

“HER BARBED-WIRE SMILE
LIFTED YOU TO HEAVEN
BUT I HAVE TO ASK
DID GOD LOOK LIKE HER VOICE”
― Amy King, This Opera of Peace

“POETRY HAS A PEPTIC PRESENCE. PRESENTLY.”
― Amy King, Kiss Me With the Mouth of Your Country

“DESPITE THE INVENTION OF TIME MACHINES, WE KEEP BEING LINEAR.”
― Amy King, Slaves to Do These Things

“WORDS SHLD BE FREE. RELEASE THEM FROM THEIR SENTENCES.”
― Amy King, I'm the Man Who Loves You

“OMG! I DESIGNED THIS NEW SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM! IT'S CALLED "POETRY" - YOU HAVE TO READ AMY KING'S POEMS TO GET AN INVITE ~”
― Amy King, I'm the Man Who Loves You

“POETRY SHAPES MY GENDER.”
― Amy King, I'm the Man Who Loves You

“YOU SAY "POET" LIKE THAT MEANS SOMETHING.”
― Amy King, I Want to Make You Safe

“LIFE IS NEVER OVER.”
― Amy King, The Good Campaign

“SPOILER ALERT: EVERYONE FALLS IN LOVE & DIES!”
― Amy King, I Want to Make You Safe

“IT'S NOT THE HONEY WHISKEY IN A FRIDAY NIGHT - IT'S THE MANIC SHOW OF POETRY TWEETS THAT TURNS ME ON.”
― Amy King, I Want to Make You Safe

“SOME PEOPLE SIMPLY DO NOT EXIST ANYMORE. GET USED TO IT. QUESTION MARK.”
― Amy King, The Good Campaign

“Amy King is a true bard.”
― Tomaž Šalamun

“The Ozarks are a fixture in my mindscape, but I didn't stay local in every respect. I always think of Miles Davis, "People who don't change end up like folk musicians playing in museums, local as a motherfucker." I wouldn't describe my attachment to home as ghostly, but long-distanced. My ear has been licked by many other tongues.”
― C. D. Wright

“STUFF POETS STILL LIKE: POETRY”
― Amy King, Slaves to Do These Things

“ERRORS ARE WHAT MAKE US HUMAN. PLOT TWIST: I'M A HORSE.”
― Amy King, Slaves to Do These Things

“We come from a country that has made a fetish if not a virtue out of proving it can live without art: high, low, old, new, fat, lean, and particularly the rarely visible nocturnal art of poetry.
We must do something with our time on this small aleatory sphere for motives other than money. Power is not an acceptable surrogate.”
― C. D. Wright

“it is not that complexity is overrated, but is is overcomplicated; it is not that obscurity is too obscure, it's that the underside grows grungy if it isn't exposed to the change of air;

it is not that the language is exhausted, it is that we run down; it's not that the edge won't cut anymore, it is that the cuts are getting thinner;

it's not that art is artificial, it is that the artists get outright seditty; it's not that literary reputations are not inevitable, it's that they are invented;

not that theories are not beautiful, but that they are feeble”
― C. D. Wright

“But something special happened to American poetry in the 19th century when Walt Whitman broke with more traditional English poetics and fashioned an American poetic style as innovative and imaginative as the new nation itself. He created a persona narrator whose ambition it was to embrace all the ideals and spirit of rebellion and revolutionary zeal of its history, while creating a language free of old world formalists constraints. His new music was influenced by the Hebraic bible in its use of incantation and rhythmic repetition, and his stories were also both biblical and innovative in nature.”
― Phillip Schultz

“Welcome to our America. A land vastly different from what they want us to believe about her.”
― A.K. Kuykendall

“We dare not be original; our American Pine must be cut to the trim pattern of the English Yew, though the Pine bleed at every clip. This poet tunes his lyre at the harp of Goethe, Milton, Pope, or Tennyson. His songs might better be sung on the Rhine than the Kennebec. They are not American in form or feeling; they have not the breath of our air; the smell of our ground is not in them. Hence our poet seems cold and poor. He loves the old mythology; talks about Pluto—the Greek devil,—�� the Fates and Furies—witches of old time in Greece,��-but would blush to use our mythology, or breathe the name in verse of our Devil, or our own Witches, lest he should be thought to believe what he wrote. The mother and sisters, who with many a pinch and pain sent the hopeful boyto college, must turn over the Classical Dictionary before they can find out what the youth would be at in his rhymes. Our Poet is not deep enough to see that Aphrodite came from the ordinary waters, that Homer only hitched into rhythm and furnished the accomplishment of verse to street talk, nursery tales, and old men’s gossip, in the Ionian towns; he thinks what is common is unclean. So he sings of Corinth and Athens, which he never saw, but has not a word to say of Boston, and Fall River, and Baltimore, and New York, which are just as meet for song. He raves of Thermopylae and
Marathon, with never a word for Lexington and Bunkerhill, for Cowpens, and Lundy’s Lane, and Bemis’s Heights. He loves to tell of the Ilyssus, of �� smooth sliding Mincius, crowned with vocal reeds,�� yet sings not of the Petapsco, the Susquehannah, the Aroostook, and the Willimantick. He prates of the narcissus, and the daisy, never of American dandelions andbue-eyed grass; he dwells on the lark and the nightingale, but has not a thought for the brown thrasher and the bobolink, who every morning in June rain down such showers of melody on his affected head. What a lesson Burns teaches us addressing his “rough bur thistle,�� his daisy, “wee crimson tippit thing,�� and finding marvellous poetry in the mouse whose nest his plough turned over! Nay, how beautifully has even our sweet Poet sung of our own Green river, our waterfowl,of the blue and fringed gentian, the glory of autumnal days.”
― Massachussetts Quarterly Review, 1849

“—a place where thought can take its shape as quietly in the mind as water in a pitcher...”
― Wendell Berry, Openings: Poems

“Good Seed (The Sonnet)

It is existentially impossible,
For all republicans to be inhuman fiend.
But when they violate human rights as daily choir,
It is also impossible to notice the good seed.
It is existentially impossible,
For all republicans to incite hate and violence.
But when a party coddles guns over children,
It is difficult to find anything good in them.
It is existentially impossible,
For all republicans to confuse divinity with division.
But when a party uses bible as an excuse for bigotry,
It is impossible to see the silent vessels of inclusion.
Forgive me, if at times I have been harsh at an entire party!
I know you're there, o good seed - it is time to grow some greenery.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Himalayan Sonneteer: 100 Sonnets of Unsubmission

“If America fails in advancement, so will the world,
If South America fails in liberty, so will the world.
If Mexico fails in passion, so will the world,
If India fails in diversity, so will the world.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans

“We sit on our porch sipping root beer floats,
birthday candles stuck into ice cream.

Later we'll pick strawberries, play miniature
golf. There is nothing wrong with this life.”
― Laura Davies Foley, The Glass Tree

“I dreamed in a dream of a city where all the men were like brothers,
O I saw them tenderly love each other - I often saw them, in numbers, walking hand in hand;
I dreamed that was a city of robust friends - Nothing was greater there than manly love - it led the rest,
It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city, and in all their looks and words.-”
― Walt Witman