poems distilled

15
Memory is the purest form of imagination.
(Wordsworth, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”)

45

Anyone can be a gun, but it takes a poet to go off half-cocked.
(Dickinson, 768)

169

Finding a poem in a blank page is like finding a snowman in flakes still falling from the sky.
(Stevens, “The Snow Man”)

321

The lamb that hears the growl needn’t stick around for the howl.
(Ginsberg, “Howl”)

454

A dream’s best intentions often end up a waking nightmare.

(L. Hughes, “Let America Be America Again")

464

Sometimes we have to die many times to figure out how we want to live.
(Plath, “Lady Lazarus”)

—George Murray, Quick (ECW Press, 2017)