I would talk in iambic pentameter if it were easier.
Poetry: the best words in the best order.
I fell in love with poetry through storytelling, so my poetry tends to be fairly narrative. I like characters, I like having a beginning, middle, and ending, though not necessarily in that order.
What happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page.
To me, a poem that's in rhyme and meter is the difference between watching a film in full color and watching a film in black and white. Not that a few black and white films aren't wonderful. So are certain successful pieces of free verse.
If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.
For me, there is a paradox in poetry, which is like the paradox in tragedy. You have the most terrible subject, but it's in a form that is so sensually gratifying that it connects the surviving heart to the despairing intellect.
Rhyme, that enslaved queen, that supreme charm of our poetry, that creator of our meter.
If you want to be a poet, you can just write it on a napkin, and it's the length of the napkin, I guess. But usually you decide you'll rhyme it, or you'll have a formula. In radio, that's something called, 'Close your eyes and listen.'
The first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.
We live in such a digital age. Paper is going out of our lives. A poem on paper is tangible.
My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.
The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm: usually because they could not walk.
A poem in form still has to have voice, gesture, a sense of discovery, a metaphoric connection, as any poetry does.
Metrics are not a device for restraining the mad, any more than 'open form' or free verse is a prairie where a man can do all kinds of manly things in a state of wholesome unrestrictedness.
