Anne Stevenson

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.

I never wanted to be a pop star.

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

I've cancelled all my subscriptions to poetry magazines. I prefer to read the 'New Scientist.'

Looking back at it now, any objective account of my life is bound to read like a cross between 'The Wife of Bath's Tale' and a travel brochure.

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.

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?

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

Writing in a strict form can surprise you.

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

When everything is for 'fun' nothing is for the good.

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

Sylvia Plath was just a month and a half older than I, and when she committed suicide I was only 30 - and very shocked and sorry. I never knew her personally.

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.

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

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.

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 married a young Englishman in Cambridge in 1955 and have lived in Britain every since.

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

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.

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.

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

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