Sherman Alexie Quotes

After you kind of find your footing, sonnets are what comes easiest.

There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must try to write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, and not a practice sonnet.

In high school, we studied a lot of poetical forms. I was really interested in the math that was involved and the strange live break ups. That gave me a great amount of respect for a rhymed stanza.

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.

I like to write poetry.

I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.

Scorn not the sonnet. Critic, you have frowned, Mindless of its just honours; with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.

With Shakespeare, if you're not going to do the iambic pentameter, do some other play.

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

Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited.

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

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

Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space - for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare!

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

At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse.

I've spent so much time with iambic pentameter that I can now recognize it when I hear it in conversation or a movie - it's like a weird, useless superpower.

Emily Dickinson seems rather tame because she pretty much uses the same meter every time. It's called 'common meter.' It's a line of four beats that's followed by a line of three beats.

I love to write poetry.

Many varieties of sonnet, of course, have been written over the ages.

I love poetry - just to read it and be around it.

I'd say almost that words come first, melody second.

Often you've read another poem that you think is so beautiful that you'd like to make something like that. And so you try to make a sonnet that works in a certain kind of way, or you try to make something that's songlike, or you create a refrain, or you love the way a poem works in two line stanzas and you try to do that.

I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question.

I love poetry. I love rhyming. Do you know, there are poets who don't rhyme? Shakespeare did not rhyme most of the time, and that's why I do not like him.