Anne Stevenson Quotes

I love words. They're fun. I don't think any word can just be filler. There's no room for it. It's like a puzzle. Every song can be written a million times. How can you say it differently?

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

A Shakespeare could have arisen only on English soil. In the same way, your great dramatists and poets express the nature and essence of the Norwegian people, but they also express that which is universally valid for all mankind.

Tom Sleigh's poetry is hard-earned and well founded. I great admire the way it refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution.

I've always felt that some of my best lyrics are less than three minutes long, and it's great when you can do that - be succinct and get the message across in a simple, clear idea.

The real art is not to come up with extraordinary clever words but to make ordinary simple words do extraordinary things. To use the language that we all use and to make amazing things occur.

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

When the poet makes his perfect selection of a word, he is endowing the word with life.

In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.

I wanted to reimagine the role, in a way that was respectful of its traditional responsibilities but made them part of a wider pattern of poetry about national incidents, events, preoccupations; and to spend a great deal of time going to schools trying to demystify poetry.

I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom... in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

The poetical language of an age should be the current language heightened.

The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It's able to connect young people in a deep way to language... it's language as play.

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

As great minds have the faculty of saying a great deal in a few words, so lesser minds have a talent of talking much, and saying nothing.

I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting.

The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

We try to write things that work on a variety of levels at the same time: A sleek exterior with a turbulent lyric.

I remember reading Dr. Seuss books, and he's rhyming so many words together and I just loved the way it sounded. It became a challenge for me, to put words together that nobody would ever think about putting together.

Who often, but without success, have prayed for apt Alliteration's artful aid.

I think that too many people think too much about my lyrics. I am more a person who works with the sound of a word than with its meaning. Often I just choose the words because of the rhythm not because of the meaning.

The time is right to mix sentences with dirt and the sun with punctuation and rain with verbs.