My approach to writing rhymes went hand in hand with the music. I'd try to make different rhythms with my rhymes on the track by tripping up patterns, using multi-syllable words, different syncopations. I'd try to be like a different instrument.
Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
The terms of poetry - some simple, some complicated, some ancient, some new - should bring us closer to what we're hearing, enlarging our experience of it, enabling us to describe what we're reading, to feel and think with greater precision.
I've always really enjoyed sounds and alliteration and funny words and funny melodies.
The sounds and rhythms of words are really important to me.
We get the papers: I prefer broadsheets because I had the fear of God put into me by the tabloids and, though I'm very much over it, I still don't really like to read them. It's a destructive vernacular that makes me angry and scared, and it is all sensationalist onomatopoeia and alliteration.
Have you ever heard a good joke? If you've ever heard someone just right, with the right pacing, then you're already on the way to poetry. It's about using words in very precise ways and using gesture.
Lyrics are very different. There is a clear line between that and a poem. Something that has been a source of great excitement and delight for me is this idea that I get to rhyme.
Poetry is composing for the breath.
I like words. I like the way they clash around together and bang up against each other, especially in songs.
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary.
I do love perusing the dictionary to find how many words I don't use - words that have specific, sharp, focused meaning. I also love the sound of certain words. I love the sound of the word pom-pom.
Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
The long poem cannot be a digressive, expansive, boring exposition. It is really made of very sharp, Imagistic, quintessential poetic elements.
There's no musical landscape to poetry. It has somewhat of a higher standard than songs, I think.
Poetry: the best words in the best order.
I don't think of poetry as a 'rational' activity but as an aural one. My poems usually begin with words or phrases which appeal more because of their sound than their meaning, and the movement and phrasing of a poem are very important to me.
Poetry, first and foremost, is the lyric. It's the music.
Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.
Poems are a form of music, and language just happens to be our instrument - language and breath.
Though my poems are about evenly split between traditionally formal work that uses rhyme and meter and classical structure, and work that is freer, I feel that the music of language remains at the core of it all. Sound, rhythm, repetition, compression - these elements of my poetry are also elements of my prose.
I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language.
The word trill really REALLY bugs me! Like who made that up???
I had a role in 'DodgeBall,' where I played a pirate who played dodge ball. I'd say 80 to 90 percent of my lines were 'Garrr' or 'Arghh.' And it was all about what the quality of your 'Grr-arr' was.
Poetry is meant to be heard.
