X. J. Kennedy Quotes

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

Part of what we love about poetry is the fact that it seems ancient, that it has an authority of ancient language and ancient form, and that it's timeless, that it reaches back.

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

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

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

I love form, but I'm not interested in forms. I've never written a sonnet or villanelle or sestina or any of that. For me, it's a kind of line. It's a rhythm. It's something musical.

I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes.

Southern poets are still writing narrative poems, poems in forms, dramatic poems.

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.

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

I discover poetry when I was in elementary school and I was so fascinated by it. Because I realised if you get the right amount of syllables and the right amount of words, in the right rhyme scheme and you put it all together. You make words just bounce of a page.

I dislike a great deal of contemporary poetry - all of the past you read is usually quite great - but it is a useful thorn to have in one's side.

A beautiful line of verse has twelve feet, and two wings.

The lines of poetry, the period of prose, and even the texts of Scripture most frequently recollected and quoted, are those which are felt to be preeminently musical.

If I wrote in a sonnet form, I would be distorting. Or if I had some great new idea for line breaks and I used it in a poem, but it's really not right for that poem, but I wanted it, that would be distorting.

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

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.

Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.

I have piles of poetry books in the bathroom, on the stairs, everywhere. The only way to write poetry is to read it.

When critics are waiting to pounce upon poetic style on exactly the same grounds as if it were prose, the poets tremble.

I don't think it's always good to read lots of poetry.

I've always thought my poems told stories.

This is what rhyme does. In a couplet, the first rhyme is like a question to which the second rhyme is an answer. The first rhyme leaves something in the air, some unanswered business. In most quatrains, space is created between the rhyme that poses the question and the rhyme that gives the answer - it is like a pleasure deferred.

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