Anna Journey Quotes

#1. My obsessions tend to cluster, so I often have families of poems in which only a couple of them make it to the book. It can be satisfying to banish poems to my "crappy poems" file.

Anna Journey

#2. I prefer assonance and internal rhyme to end rhyme. I mean, the sonnet already looks like a box. Best not to get too boxed in, though.

Anna Journey

#3. I like to work with multiple sections because they lend themselves to the structure of the poem: its intensifications and arcs and closures. I feel like working with smaller units feels more natural to the way I write poems.

Anna Journey

#4. Many of the poems weave autobiographical elements with fabular or mythic materials.

Anna Journey

#5. I tend to gravitate toward the realm of superstition (cures and such) and odd scientific facts (like bioluminescent shrimp and fistulated cows). I like the intimacy that I often find in the grotesque.

Anna Journey

#6. Many of the poets I most admire have a way of embodying their peculiar obsessions via landscape that can sometimes seem magical.

Anna Journey

#7. I'm very interested in the materiality of language. I wonder if, perhaps, this comes from my background in the visual arts. I was a potter for a number of years and earned a BFA in art before going to graduate school for creative writing.

Anna Journey

#8. I tend to employ braided narrative threads in the lyric, so often echoes (of phrases or images) will occur and will hit my ear so I can shape different resonances and shifts in tone.

Anna Journey

#9. I think the grotesque can inspire intimacy (it draws us in) as well as awe, like the cabinets of curiosities.

Anna Journey

#10. I tend to view the superstitions or fragments of myth as triggers for lyric inquiry. I also find I think of this kind of language as ars poetica - if we can find the right combination of words, we can make something improbably or extraordinary happen.

Anna Journey