I couldn’t believe verse was supposed to be hard. It was a snap for me. I loved Shakespeare.
France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
Juilliard is wonderful in that they don’t pick just one way of working. They give you a palette. There is method acting. There is a lot of attention to Shakespeare and verse.
Country music especially can get very formulaic – you know, you have to have your verses and a bridge and a chorus, and a lot of the songs are written as just plain and simple poetry on the road.
What is the Tao Te Ching? Five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a God-realized being named Lao-tzu in ancient China dictated 81 verses which are regarded by many as the ultimate commentary on the nature of existence.
A friend of mine encouraged me to try rapping, so I started experimenting with it, writing verses, seeing if I could fit an extra word or syllable into each line without tripping myself up.
The iambic pentameter owes its pre-eminence in English poetry to its genius for variation. Good blank verse does not sound like a series of identically measured lines. It sounds like a series of subtle variations on the same theme.
When I was 15 or 16 playing in groups, we used to sit in the car and try to write the lyrics down as a song was playing, and we’d assign each person a verse, you know: ‘I’m going to do the first one. You go for the second one.’ And then sometimes you’d wait an hour for it to come on again so you could finish it up.
But I do not want to use Hungarian verses for British people.
It felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders the day I finally finished both verses for ‘My Shot.’
Yes, the work comes out more beautiful from a material that resists the process, verse, marble, onyx, or enamel.
My only verse I remember really working on was ‘Mixtape,’ and I took 45 minutes on that because I wanted it to be tight.
I don’t like doing things without understanding the meaning. Once I walked out of a film event as I could not stand the insult they meted out to a Sanskrit verse.
Dante Alighieri is a universal poet, and great creators, they are writing for everybody always. Every single verse is very moving, and the beauty – if we don’t understand, we just stay listening to the sound and it’s like hearing music.
You know for some strange reason I like to write the verse first. I mean I know the majority of people do the chorus first and when I think about it, I guess it does make more sense to do the chorus first, but I just like to write the verses first, I don’t know why.
Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have – Cincinnati sounds worse.
Metrics are not a device for restraining the mad, any more than ‘open form’ or free verse is a prairie where a man can do all kinds of manly things in a state of wholesome unrestrictedness.
Ab-Souls Outro’ serves as a jazzy, spoken summation of ‘Section.80’s themes. Guest cohort Ab-Soul opens the song with one urgent verse after another: Flowing freely like the saxophone behind him, his words advocate veering outside life’s most predictable pathways.
I will keep a Bible or Koran on me at all times – the Bible I can actually carry on my phone, and any hotel you go to has a Bible, but the Koran is harder. I keep a physical Koran in my guitar case and put it on the table in hotel rooms so after a day’s work, I can read a few verses.
Teenagers are free verse walking around on two legs.
What I view as worship now is certainly a little different than how I used to view worship. I don’t see it as a verse in a chorus, on a big screen with words, like I used to. It’s just trying to be as real as possible in front of an audience.
Self-editing is the way I write. Ten verses of a song and it’s finished. Then we start playing it and if I see that it’s too long, I’ll start cutting.
I just can’t sit down and write three verses and a chorus and a bridge anymore. It just don’t find it inspiring.
One hundred percent, all your Shakespeare training serves you in the work in musical theater today: specifically in modern musical theater, our soliloquies, and now what we call rap. It’s the reason it’s so easy to learn, because it’s verse; it’s rhyme! It just sticks in the soul very easily.
Well, it’s a badge of honour for any self-respecting poet to be criticized by Auberon Waugh. But in a lot of ways my poems are very conventional, and it’s no big deal for me to write a poem in either free verse or strict form; modern poets can, and do, do both.
Most of those who make collections of verse or epigram are like men eating cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all.
No verse is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.
A lot of fans have been requesting that in-your-face song, a sense of feeling empowered. And ‘Good Woman’ is that: a relatable song celebrating the good woman. I’m also really proud of the third verse, which I wrote.
A book of verses underneath the bough, A jug of wine, a loaf of bread-and thou.
To the poet, his travels, his adventures, his loves, his indignations are finally resolved in verse, and this, in the end becomes his permanent, indestructible life.
That was in the days when everyone rode a bicycle, and the journal had a circulation of over one hundred and twenty-five thousand weekly, so my verses and illustrations became known to a fairly large public.
I was learning ‘Changes’ at the time that my mom was sick and she was leaving me. And those last verses in that song, they really struck my soul, totally.
So it is in poetry. All we ask is that the mood recorded shall impress us as having been of the kind that exhausts the imaginative capacity; if it fails to do this the failure will announce itself either in prose or in insignificant verse.
Some of the finest Shakespeare has been done recently by college theater programs. I’ll tell you what these young kids have: They have a natural authority in Shakespeare. They feel a right to do it. And once they honor the humanity of it, the rhythm of the verse comes with it.
I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it’s not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.
To achieve the very pinnacle of good taste, the neoclassicists wrote their plays entirely in alexandrine verse, a rarefied meter that is uniquely tailored to the French language and fits no other.
Verse satire indeed is entirely our own.
If a poem is not memorable, there’s probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable.
To me, a poem that’s in rhyme and meter is the difference between watching a film in full color and watching a film in black and white. Not that a few black and white films aren’t wonderful. So are certain successful pieces of free verse.
The main problem with writing in verse is, if your fourth line doesn’t come out right, you’ve got to throw four lines away and figure out a whole new way to attack the problem. So the mortality rate is terrific.
An exact poetic duplication of a man is for the poet a negation of the earth, an impossibility of being, even though his greatest desire is to speak to many men, to unite with them by means of harmonious verses about the truths of the mind or of things.
Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don’t by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.
