Sophie Hannah Quotes

I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.

I write... sonnets... and writing sonnets is boring. You have to find rhymes; you have to write hendecasyllables; so after a while, I get bored and my drawer is overflowing with unfinished short poems.

There are people who think it's easier to write books in verse, and it's definitely not.

I love form, but I'm not interested in forms. I've never written a sonnet or villanelle or sestina or any of that. For me, it's a kind of line. It's a rhythm. It's something musical.

I guess I find the boundaries between poetry and prose to be somewhat permeable.

If you're gonna use simile, analogy, metaphor, be descriptive and have some flowery adjectives and a few odd nouns and some engaging bits of dialogue or sentiment, then you're sort of writing a novel, really. But rock lyrics are not really known for their sophistication.

It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.

My next project is to get back to that. Actually, to learn how to write poetry. I'm not kidding.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

Poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that in the pouring out of one language into another it will evaporate.

I studied poetry in college and for a year in an MFA program. As time went on, my poems got more and more complicated. What I was really trying to do was tell stories.

I want to prove that if you write in strict meter and rhyme about subjects people care about, they will buy poetry.

My poems tend to have rhetorical structures; what I mean by that is they tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There tends to be an opening, as if you were reading the opening chapter of a novel. They sound like I'm initiating something, or I'm making a move.

There was a period in my life when I was very young that I wrote a sonnet a day just to learn concision in writing.

I can make rhymes. My style of writing is kind of childlike anyway.

I write the occasional poem. I think my dabbling in poetry makes me better at screenplays. Poetry teaches the value of condensing, the importance of talking in a few words.

I really liked writing rhyming poems and plays.

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

When I am writing fiction, I believe I am much better organized, more methodical - one has to be when writing a novel. Writing poetry is a state of free float.

The talent of a true writer and poet is in the ear.

I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.

Once we start hitting lyrical themes that can whack you from all these different perspectives, we know we're onto something special.

Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

I'm a writer; I like to retain subtlety and nuance.