Anne Stevenson Quotes

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

One problem we face comes from the lack of any agreed sense of how we should be working to train ourselves to write poetry.

The importance of poetry is not measured, finally, by what the poet says but by how he says it.

Poems have a different music from ordinary language, and every poem has a different kind of music of necessity, and that's, in a way, the hardest thing about writing poetry is waiting for that music, and sometimes you never know if it's going to come.

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

I write poetry. It comes naturally to me, but from a technical point of view it forces me to pay close attention to language and to scan.

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

I didn't read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a poet is a maker. Before that, I thought a poet was someone who wrote about his own experiences.

I intended an Ode, And it turned to a Sonnet.

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

My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.

Well, I like to write poetry. I'm a published poet.

Again like Williams, with the emphasis now regrettable, when a man makes a poem, makes it mind you, he takes the words as he finds them lying interrelated about him.

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.

I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.

In the world of poetry there are would-be poets, workshop poets, promising poets, lovesick poets, university poets, and a few real poets.

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

Like most lit nerds, I'm a voracious reader. I never got enough poetry under my belt growing up but I do read it - some of my favorites, Gina Franco and Angela Shaw and Cornelius Eady and Kevin Young, remind me daily that unless the words sing and dance, what's the use of putting them down on paper.

When I discovered the lyric poem, that advanced not by narrative steps but by blocks and layers of imagery, I said, 'Gee, I probably could do that. So let me try that.'

When I first started reading poetry, all the poets I read - Edgar Allan Poe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier - were rhyme poets. That's what captured me.

What makes a poem is the discipline inherent in making a poem: trying to fit feelings in the requisite number of syllables and lines, disciplining one's feelings.

That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.

Writers must... take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.

When you're doing poetry like mine that rhymes, it's very easy to sound like a song that didn't work out!

Find a poet whose style you like, emulate that style, then deal with things that you know about - don't waste your time looking for your own style.' I wish I could remember who told me that, because I'd like to congraulate him. I've emulated all the old guys - Tennyson, Alexander Pope.