Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes

The form of free verse is as binding and as liberating as the form of a rondeau.

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

The tougher the form the easier it is for me to handle the poem, because the form gives permission to be very gut honest about feelings.

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

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

I started writing poetry in high school because I wanted desperately to write, but somehow, writing stories didn't appeal to me, and I loved the flow and the feel and sense of poetry, especially that of what one might call formal verse.

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

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

Poetry was syllable and rhythm. Poetry was the measurement of breath. Poetry was time make audible. Poetry evoked the present moment; poetry was the antidote to history. Poetry was language free from habit.

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.

My own verse is usually free verse. The freer the better.

For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument that makes a poem.

Don't be married to a line or verse if it can't rhyme, fit the meter, or doesn't fit the outline.

When I'm constructing a poem, I'm trying to write one good line after another. One solid line after another. You know a lot of the lines - some hold up better as lines than others. But I'm not thinking of just writing a paragraph and then chopping it up.

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

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical - their data are in the way they sound. A poet's biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.

My intention is to write poems. That's what I've been doing most of my life.

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.

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

Most people who write and publish poetry teach or do something else.

Anyone who holds a pen these days thinks he or she is a poet.

I've written poetry most of my life.

Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?.

I've got mixed feelings about poetry cause done well poetry is fantastic. But not many people are capable of doing it well. I think you should have some kind of license to perform poetry. A poetic license perhaps.