Joanna Newsom Quotes

There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must try to write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, and not a practice sonnet.

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

I teach writing courses and first of all, I teach my students what prosody is.

When poetry separates from song, then the words have to carry all the rhythm themselves; they have to do all the work. They can't rely on the singing voice.

At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and innumerable other kinds of verse.

The word "Verse" is used here as the term most convenient for expressing, and without pedantry, all that is involved in the consideration of rhythm, rhyme, meter, and versification... the subject is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertains to the mathematics.

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

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.

The form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a - you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet.

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 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.

I studied poetry in college and for a year in an MFA program. As time went on, my poems got more and more complicated. What I was really trying to do was tell stories.

Emily Dickinson seems rather tame because she pretty much uses the same meter every time. It's called 'common meter.' It's a line of four beats that's followed by a line of three beats.

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

Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.

Poetry has become the higher algebra of metaphors.

Sonnet is about movement in a form.

I don't see that a single line can constitute a stanza, although it can constitute a whole poem.

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

There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.

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

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

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

And the second question, can poetry be taught? I didn't think so.