Ten Poetry Quotes

     

1.     I get depressed when I look around me in our Kenyan schools. It is the same lethargy towards poetry as if it were some form of a dinosaur that was placed right in the middle of our Literature classrooms. What students forget is that poetry is not a punishment disguised in an examination question but the rhythm of life.

2.     In this era where everything is commercialised, I am usually asked why I haven’t published or why I don’t want to cash in on my poetry. Being a skill, an art which must be nurtured, I feel that I should continue applying my mind to writing poetry until such a time when I won’t go to publishers but publishers will come to me.

3.     Of all the writing experiences I have had so far, none excites my imagination than the art of writing poetry. An idea froths in my mind, brewing up and spilling on my blog. I always feel inclined to write a poem as if it was a sacred duty. Once a poem has been freed from my mind and heart, then and only then, can I rest.

4.     When friends ask  me where my poetry will be in the next 10 years, I always put up a broad smile and tell them that they don’t need to be anywhere in the next 10 years because once I have written them they are immortalized.

5.     God in His wisdom gave me the gift of writing poetry because He thought that my body and arms were not strong enough to physically demonstrate the power of my words. It is a good deal. If you come to think of it, a line of my poem can be a verb that can shake the strongest of men, an adjective that can paint the saddest picture of a tyrant and a conjunction to piece together the most scathing diatribe. But I don’t intend my poems to be such but to soothe and encourage and motivate because this world is full of so much pain that we don’t need to add more to it.

6.     I always pray to Tororot, the God of the Rising Sun, that I should not lose the clarity of my vision. All around me, I am filled with a lot of humour. While others are busy calling this life dull, I find this to be a plain joke. I once stared at two lizards on my wall for almost one hour and all this time so many questions were running through my mind.

7.     I am not very sure about what the weather would be tomorrow or what will pop up in the news. All I am sure about is that whether it rains or not or the news are good or bad, I will somehow join the dots and pieces, the odds and ends and capture that moment. This is what I call poetry.

8.     My teachers have told me that there is no way one can have more than one conversation at the same time. I beg to differ. As I sit here, I am conversing with so many people at the same time and somehow there is harmony to all this. I find congruence to all of them.

9.     Of all the accomplishments I can boast of in life, speaking to your heart takes pride of place. There are so many irritating balderdash floating within us. If out of all these, a line of my poetry hit the soft spots of your heart, that is the best commendation I can hope for as a poet.

10.  Let the echoes of the hills continue to reverberate. And let us, the pilgrims, assemble at the foothills and catch the whispers in our hearts. The echoes are not limited in time. The message never gets stale.