Janet Fitch Quotes

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

Prose is all about embellishing and describing.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

'Love' is so short of perfect rhymes that convention allows half-rhymes like 'move.' The alternative is a plague of doves, or a kind of poem in which the poet addresses his adored both as 'love' and as 'guv' - a perfectly decent solution once, but only once, in a while.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

I like poems that are little games.

I like poems that are complex.

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

It helped my lyric writing so much studying poetry. I thought I knew what poetry was before I immersed myself in it. Poetry is meditative. It's reflective.

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.

Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.

When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

Poetry is one of the few nasty childhood habits I've managed to grow out of.

In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and the images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.

Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.

Lyricists play with words.

Form is endlessly interesting to me, and I love poetry as a formal enterprise.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

People used to say poems were different to songs but I don't think they are.

Poetry surrounds us everywhere, but putting it on paper is, alas, not so easy as looking at it.

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

There's something so wonderful about writing in rhyme where it isn't just the meaning of the words, it's the music to the words and the shape and the sound.