“The poem, a harmonious flow of nuances, demands a musical rhythm, Vers libre.”
F. S. Flint (1885–1960) English Imagist poet
Contemporary French Poetry, The Poetry Review, 1914
Introduction to Collected Poems, 1929
“The poem, a harmonious flow of nuances, demands a musical rhythm, Vers libre.”
F. S. Flint (1885–1960) English Imagist poet
Contemporary French Poetry, The Poetry Review, 1914
“For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz.”
Françoise Sagan (1935–2004) French writer
Paris Review interview (1956)
Context: For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary.
“I write music with my mouth — first lyrics, then song, then rhythm.”
Tato Laviera (1950–2013) Puerto Rican writer
On his creative process in “An Interview with Tato Laviera, the King of Nuyorican Poetical Migrations” https://www.latinorebels.com/2012/07/11/an-interview-with-tato-laviera-the-king-of-nuyorican-poetical-migrations/ in Latino Rebels (2012 Jul 11)
Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931) American poet
What It Means to Be a Poet in America (1926)
Context: Whenever I begin to write a poem or draw a picture I am, in imagination, if not in reality, back in my room where I began to draw pen-and-ink pictures and write verses in my seventeenth year. Both windows of the room look down on the great Governor’s Yard of Illinois. This yard is a square block, a beautiful park. Our house is on so high a hill I can always look down upon the governor. Among my very earliest memories are those of seeing old Governor Oglesby leaning on his cane, marching about, calling his children about him.
“I find free verse very, very difficult to write.”
John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet