PARADE: What did you ... have that champions need?
Martina: I think the ability to fail. Not being afraid to put it all on the line and come up short. Most people don't have that.From A Winning Friendship in PARADE Magazine
As a broad working definition, art awakens feeling.... That is what songs do, even dumb pop songs: they remind us that emotions are not an inconvenient and vaguely embarrassing aspect of the human enterprise but its central purpose.
Ben: You're pretty.That's it—our relationship in a nutshell.
KT: I'm hungry, I have to pee, and I feel dizzy.
Ben: Well, it becomes you.
Robert Frost said that writing poetry without rhyme is like playing tennis without a net. And that having to rhyme helped him to think of words and even ideas.... Consider the writing of a poem as the playing of a game, getting the ball through a hoop, a technical problem to be solved. It may seem very unpoetic but it leads to better luck with poems.
What you need for writing poems then is some interesting games to play, that is, some interesting rules you must obey. Allen Tate once described a poet as someone "willing to come under the bondage of limitations—if he can find them."—Peter Elbow, Writing with Power
