“Why should poetry have to make sense?” —Charlie Chaplin

Mad lover’s poems
compress a rosy garden
in compost and rain

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.

―William Shakespeare

Love poems gush blood
from the heart of the stupor’d,
pierced by Cupid’s dart

But the lover’s power is the poet’s power. He can make love from all the common strings with which this world is strung.

—Amelia Barr

Gospel poems spit
the saliva of desire
in the devil’s eye

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

—Wallace Stevens

Senryrū, like haiku,
brushstrokes of calligraphy,
grand art in shorthand

Humor has justly been regarded as the finest perfection of poetic genius

—Thomas Carlyle