Quotes from Anne Stevenson

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

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

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

Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister - who is a children's writer married to a poet.

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.

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.

I truly hate marketing promotions, and I don't at all approve of encouraging wannabe poets to write bad poetry.

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

Many varieties of sonnet, of course, have been written over the ages.

Have you ever heard of a pianist who never had to practice - or of an architect who didn't bother to find out why buildings stand up?

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.

Poets these days, like artists and composers, have won for themselves almost unlimited freedom. You can pass yourself off as a painter without being able to draw, as a composer without being conscious of key relationships, and as a poet without making yourself familiar with traditional verse forms.

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