Art & Creativity Quote by Anne Stevenson

Stevenson frames writing less as performance than as self-interrogation: a practical tool for getting unstuck. The opening hedge, "I write, or used to write", is doing more than signaling age or a shift in habits. It quietly punctures the romantic idea of the poet as perpetually inspired. Creativity here has seasons; the need to translate confusion into language can wane, or be replaced by other forms of attention. That small self-correction also models the very process she describes: thinking on the page, revising mid-breath, refusing a clean, heroic narrative about the work.

Her phrasing makes writing sound like a private court of appeal, invoked when life won’t yield to ordinary reasoning: "situations I couldn't otherwise solve or understand". The verb choice matters. "Solve" suggests a problem with moving parts, while "understand" points to the emotional and moral residue that problems leave behind. Poetry becomes a kind of cognitive technology, not for certainty, but for clarity - an attempt to pin down the shape of experience without pretending it can be fully mastered.

Then comes the pivot: "Meditation comes very naturally to me". It's not an opposition to writing so much as a companion practice - another disciplined way of sitting with ambiguity. Read in context of a poet’s long life, it hints at an evolution from articulating the self to observing it. The subtext is almost austere: language is powerful, but silence can sometimes do the job more cleanly.