Sherry Chandler

If you want to write poetry, you have to face up to the pentametrical line, and to modulate the caesura in the five-beat line is really your first job as a poet. What I learned working in the sonnet for the eight years I was writing White Elephants was how flexible the line is, how spacious the shape is. That five-beat line is, I think, the length of a human breath.
—Reetika Vazirani

That Anne Sexton I think still has a bit too much romanticism and what I think of as the “our beautiful old silver” school of female writing, which is really boasting about how “nice” we were. V. Woolf, E. Bowen, R. West, etc — they are full of it. They have to make quite sure that the reader is not going to misplace them socially, first — and that nervousness interferes constantly with what they think they’d like to say. I wrote a story at Vassar that was too much admired by Miss Rose Peebles, my teacher, who was very proud of being an old-school southern lady — and suddenly this fact about women’s writing dawned on me and has haunted me ever since.
—Elizabeth Bishop (quoted in an online araticle for which a bibliography was not included)

I think all form is a trick in order to get at the truth. Sometimes in my hardest poems, the ones that are difficult to write, I might make an impossible scheme, a syllabic count that is so involved that it then allows me to be truthful. It works as a kind of superego. It says, “You may now face it, because it will be impossible ever to get out.”
—Anne Sexton