Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.

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

The sense of flowing, which is so crucial to song, is also crucial to poetry.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

While I've had a great distaste for what's usually called song in modern poetry or for what's usually called music, I really don't think of speech as so far from song.

Poetry stands or falls by its music.

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

I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

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.

Attempts to put my poems to music have had disastrous results in all cases. And the poem, if it's written with the ear, already has been set to its own verbal music as it was composed.

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.

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.

In conversation you can use timing, a look, an inflection. But on the page all you have is commas, dashes, the amount of syllables in a word. When I write, I read everything out loud to get the right rhythm.

I'm a line-maker. I think that's what makes poets different from prose-writers. That's the main way. We think, not just in sentences the way prose writers do but also in lines. So we're doing these two things at the same time.

Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech.

I am a poet, bard, scop, minnesinger, trobairitz who is driven by sound and the possibilities for vocal expression, the mouthing of text as well as intentionality or dance on the page.

The meaning of a poem is in the cadences and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given by those lines.

What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?

A poem is a flexible thing, and a poem is a poem.

When it comes to poetry, I think partly the numbers of people attempting to write poems is probably a result or the reaction to technology.

Poetry is the mathematics of writing and closely kin to music.

I'm not a poet. I wish I was a poet but I'm not. I'm a playwright. And so I have a different set of antecedents.

No verse which is unmusical or obscure can be regarded as poetry whatever other qualities it may possess.