I try to write very fast. I don't revise very much. I write the poem in one sitting. Just let it rip. It's usually over in twenty to forty minutes. I'll go back and tinker with a word or two, change a line for some metrical reason weeks later, but I try to get the whole thing just done.
My favorite rhymes are sort of half-rhymes where you might just get the vowel sound the same, but it's not really a true rhyme. That gives you far more flexibility to capture the feeling you're trying to express. But sometimes it's best not to have any rhyme.
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.
I aspire to a poetry of great formal integrity, deep passion and high intellect, and I have many models for how to do that.
What I do say is that I can write verse, and that the writing of verse in strict form is the best possible training for writing good prose.
All of Victorian verse is pentameter.
Still may syllables jar with time, Still may reason war with rhyme, Resting never!
The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn't come out right, you've got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.
A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispensable. Latin poetry in the classical age had no use for it, and the kind of Latin poetry that does rhyme - as for instance the medieval 'Carmina Burana' - tends to be somewhat crude stuff in comparison with the classical verse that doesn't.
It should here be added that poetry habitually takes the form of verse.
Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that's usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy.
For several centuries what has passed for song in literary circles was any text that looked like the lyrics for a commonplace melodic setting.
One of the things that distinguishes poetry from ordinary speech is that in a very few number of words, poetry captures some kind of deep feeling, and rhythm is the way to get there. Rhythm is the way the poetry carries itself.
Versification is, indeed, indispensable for music, but rhyme, solely for rhyming's sake, most pernicious.
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.
Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.
Well it is certainly the case that the poems - which were in fact published during Shakespeare's lifetime - are weird if they began or originated in this form, as I think they did, because the poems get out of control.
Sonnets are guys writing in English, imitating an Italian song form. It was a form definitely sung as often as it was recited.
I really liked writing rhyming poems and plays.
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
I would never write a sentence that didn't have a nice rhythm, or at least I wouldn't leave it to be published like that. It seems to me that prose mustn't be prosaic.
What is it about meter and cadence and rhythm that makes their makers mad?
Poetry is a form of mathematics, a highly rigorous relationship with words.
There are people who think it's easier to write books in verse, and it's definitely not.
There is no escape from metre; there is only mastery.
