Poets should ignore most criticism and get on with making poetry.
From Anne Stevenson
I am now seventy, rather glad, really, that I won't live to see the horrors to come in the 21st century.
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.
A poem might be defined as thinking about feelings - about human feelings and frailties.
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.
Each word bears its weight, so you have to read my poems quite slowly.
I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy.
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.
I don't like poetry that just slaps violent words on a canvas, as it were.
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.
5 perspectives
4 perspectives
3 perspectives
2 perspectives
1 perspectives