Anne Stevenson Quotes

I like bringing my poet brain and sensibility to lyrics I write.

I always liked the magic of poetry but now I'm just starting to see behind the curtain of even the best poets, how they've used, tried and tested craft to create the illusion. Wonderful feeling of exhilaration to finally be there.

People want poetry. They need poetry. They get it. They don't want fancy work.

I consider a poem to be a kind of experiment where a number of elements are brought together under test conditions to see how they will interact to create meaning or relevance.

There are two types of poets: People who write poetically about their lives, and poets that live poetically and write about it.

I like poems that are little games.

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.

It's not easy to define poetry.

The poetic act consists of suddenly seeing that an idea splits up into a number of equal motifs and of grouping them; they rhyme.

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

I'm not a pop song lyric writer. I can't just focus on one simple meaning or even a double entendre.

I'm a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction.

A poem is bound by language, but a poetics is not.

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

I didn't read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a poet is a maker. Before that, I thought a poet was someone who wrote about his own experiences.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

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

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise.

Prose cannot compete with the economy of poetry, the ability to have a full artistic experience in a short period of time.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat.

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

Poetry is not easy. Or should I say, real poetry is not easy.

I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes.