The basic line in any good verse is cadenced... building it around the natural breath structures of speech.
Kenneth Rexroth
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Craft is something you learn by studying models.When a student asks, what is a good book about traditional iambic verse, The Collected Poems of Ben Jonson. What is an excellent book about free verse? The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. What is a good book about short line in ballad metre? The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.
Robert Pinsky
There is a natural physiological tendency to pronounce in one breath successive groups of rhythmic feet, and the rhythmic content in the average length of breathing can only be called a verse.
F. S. Flint
Still haunted by Haiku, and tried my hand at it, but I fall pitifully short of the Wordsworthian touch. But failure in this realm turned my mind to an old enthusiasm of mine, the Welsh englyn. This verse form was derived by the Welsh from the inscriptions which their Roman conquerors put on tombs ... A good englym must have four lines, of ten, then six, syllables, the last two lines having seven syllables each. In the first line there must be a break after the seventh, eighth, or ninth syllable, and the rhyme with the second line comes at this break; but the tenth syllable of the first line must either rhyme or be in assonance with the middle of the second line. The last two lines must rhyme with the first rhyme in the first line, but the third or fourth line must rhyme on a weak syllable. Got that?
Robertson Davies
The fashionable ideology that "artificial" lacks the inherent goodness of "natural" is an appealing, but hopelessly simplistic notion of the intellectually chic. Artifice is the result of a deliberate intent to make. Nature also "makes" things, using a set of basic building blocks common throughout the universe. Exchanging infinite time for deliberate design, nature has ingeniously built plants, planets, galaxies and unimaginable constructs which seem to structure the universe itself. What we call "natural" is simply the result of whatever set of rules nature has followed in fashioning our observable reality. On planet Earth, nature has manipulated the common elements to fashion everything from bacteria to the molten core of the planet. Discoveries in the "nano" technologies of bio, molecular, and micro engineering will re-edit the nomenclature of "natural" versus "unnatural", blurring if not erasing the line of distinction between "machine" and "organism", "natural" and "unnatural", "God-given" and "man-made".
Syd Mead
Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe.
Frank Zappa
Rexroth, Kenneth
Reynolds, Joshua
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