Anne Stevenson Quotes

Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.

The sea is as near as we come to another world.

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.

There's no friend like someone who has known you since you were five.

Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.

A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.

I write, or used to write, to explain to myself situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand. Meditation comes very naturally to me.

Blackbirds are the cellos of the deep farms.

My soul, how will I recognize you if we meet?

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

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.

Mind led body to the edge of the precipice. They stared in desire at the naked abyss. If you love me, said mind, take that step into silence. If you love me, said body, turn and exist.

I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.

I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art.

There comes a time when you have to trust your own judgment, when you must close your eyes and let your instinct rule you.

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.

I have always made my own rules, in poetry as in life - though I have tried of late to cooperate more with my family. I do, however, believe that without order or pattern poetry is useless.

I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.

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.

You sleep with a dream of summer weather, wake to the thrum of rain—roped down by rain. Nothing out there but drop-heavy feathers of grass and rainy air. The plastic table on the terrace has shed three legs on its way to the garden fence. The mountains have had the sense to disappear. It's the Celtic temperament—wind, then torrents, then remorse. Glory rising like a curtain over distant water. Old stonehouse, having steered us through the dark, docks in a pool of shadow all its own. That widening crack in the gloom is like good luck. Luck, which neither you nor tomorrow can depend on.

democracy is dying. We are ruled by faceless bureaucrats and lecherous puritans. ... You think about it. 'All right for me but not for you' is their philosophy.

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

I am now seventy, rather glad, really, that I won't live to see the horrors to come in the 21st century.