Logo for California Poets in the Schools Program. Terri Glass coordinates the Marin program California Poets in the Schools and served as their statewide director from 2008 to 2011.
Cluster of purple
in fine spring rain
faint scent of lilac.
A bee drops
into a poppies cup—
what a life!
Wood duck floats downstream
as I lay in the hammock
I drift with the clouds.
“A poet must achieve a balance between solitude and solidarity, between feeling
and action, between intimacy of mankind and the revelation of nature.”
“The Kings who have died one by one are now reborn in poet’s hearts.”
“Poetry is the eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.”
“Poetry is from the frontiers of consciousness.”
“Poetry is a lion because it eats and intensifies natural speech.”
“All night wild impulses
The only way to find a path
is to set fire to your life.”
“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”
“Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth:
the true poet is near the oracle.”
“You are the butterfly and you are gone.”
“A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.”
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
“Poetry is sort of a homecoming.”
“Words are alive — cut them and they bleed.”
“Wine is bottled poetry.”
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.”
“I think poetry must stay open all night in beautiful cellars.”
“Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.”
“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does.”
“The poetry of the earth is never dead.”
A poet and writer of the natural world, Terri Glass mentored under William Stafford and Robert Bly.