Meter Quotes - page 2
Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.
Francine Prose
[On David Cameron] When I heard this inherited multi-million ex-Etonian talking about a culture of entitlement, well, I'm sorry, but my irony meter went through the red and then exploded in a gale of bitter laughter. It actually went "HAA!" I was furious, because I've only just had a new irony metre installed after Rebekah Brooks complained about how she had been unfairly reported by the British press.
Marcus Brigstocke
Poetry is an art form that demands heightened attention and retention. It both invites and rewards more intense involvement than we normally give to other kinds of speech. Poetic technique, therefore, is never esoteric but eminently practical. It serves at least two purposes. First, it announces that a poem differs from other kinds of speech, that it requires the audience's special attention. A poem begins by attracting our attention through its sound, shape, typography, syntax, texture, or tone. Second, the technique maintains the audience's involvement. All poetic form is a way of keeping the audience's attention beyond what ordinary language requires. Meter, for example, creates a gentle trance state in the auditor. Since poetry is more intense, condensed, and expressive than ordinary language, it needs these techniques to carry the burden of its message.
Dana Gioia
Send me, Almighty, I petition,
In porticoes or at a ball
No bonneted academician,
No seminarist in a yellow shawl!
No more than in red lips unsmiling
Can I find anything beguiling
In grammar-perfect Russian speech.
What purist magazines beseech,
A novel breed of belles may heed it,
And bend us (for my life of sin)
To strict grammatic discipline,
Prescribing meter, too, where needed;
But I - what is all this to me?
I like things as they used to be.
Aleksandr Pushkin
Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to meter. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I always took myself really seriously... but sometimes I'd be at a venue and the guy would call me ‘sweetie' or ‘honey' when we were doing drums and stuff. I'd carry the drums in myself so people wouldn't say I was a bitch. I went very briefly to an engineering school, so I knew the difference between white noise and pink noise and what a view meter was, and a logs player and things like that. I didn't need to know but it came in handy when I was sitting with Steve Albini like ‘really? Is that a good logs player?' I barely know what it is, but I learned "Smoke On The Water" so I could go to Guitar Center and play that and not have guys look at me. It was a different time-I think girls get taken a lot more seriously now.
Courtney Love