Bonnie Jo Campbell Quotes

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

I've read some of your modern free verse and wonder who set it free.

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

But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it's no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.

I am not at all clear what free verse is anymore. That's one of the things you learn not to know.

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.

I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.

I like to write poetry.

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.'

Let me read you some of my poetry. My poetry just takes me to another level.

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.

With me it's the whole thing, it's the conceit, the idea, what the poem is saying. And it goes on just as long as is necessary to say what needs to be said.

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

I've written poetry since I was in the first grade, and it wasn't until I was a little bit older that I realized poetry could be put to music and become a song.

I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.

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.

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

There are no poetic ideas; only poetic utterances.

Actually, I'm working on a book of poetry.

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

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

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.

I'm finding that writing poetry is strengthening my songwriting, because you're learning to make a piece of writing work on a page with nothing else. I was also finding within poetry I felt a lot more free to write about very different matters, to write about social issues or things that are going on around me.

I really came to literature through poetry.

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.