Sherry Chandler » Some quotes I had scribbled in my notebook without proper attribution
Some quotes I had scribbled in my notebook without proper attribution
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
Possibly related posts:
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Leave a comment