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Exlpore more Poems quotes

"I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker."

"Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems."

"As a friendly one. I would still like to write concrete poems, but I can only do it sometimes."

"By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow."

"There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own, but what it is I just don't know."
Explore more quotes by Anne Stevenson

"I like rhyme because it is memorable, I like form because having to work to a pattern gives me original ideas."

"I play with language a great deal in my poems, and I enjoy that. I try to condense language, that is, I try to express complicated but I hope real emotions as simply as possible. But that doesn't mean the poems are simple, just that they are as truthful as I can make them."

"I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings."

"Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost."

"Sylvia Plath was just a month and a half older than I, and when she committed suicide I was only 30 - and very shocked and sorry. I never knew her personally."

"There is far too much literary criticism of the wrong kind. That is why I never could have survived as an academic."

"I work very hard on all my poems, but most of the work consists of trying not to sound as if I had worked. I try to make them sound as natural as possible, but within a quite strict form, which to my ears has a lot to do with musical rhythm and sound."

"My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do."
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