Annie Finch > Quotes

“Criticism is like politics: if you don't make your own you are by default accepting the status quo and are finally yourself responsible for whatever the status quo does to you.”
― Annie Finch, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self

“the next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern.”
― Annie Finch

“After all, what is lyric but the seamless fusion of formal control and passionate conviction, in the service of the expression of personal experience?”
― Annie Finch, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self

“. . .criticism is to poetry as air is to a noise: it allows it to be heard; and even if we can't see it or feel it, it is there, shaping how we hear.”
― Annie Finch, The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self