Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on changing our approach to creativity is just exquisite. She argues that it may be healthier and more practical to adopt a Greco-Roman view of creativity, where inspiration comes from capricious external forces, than to continue with the humanist idea of the suffering artist who’s solely responsible for the success or failure of his creations. There’s a section on poet Ruth Stone’s writing process around 10:15.

At the Wall Street Journal, 11 novelists describe their writing process:

[Kate] Christensen, who works out of her home in Tribeca, says a lot of her writing time is spent “not writing.” Most mornings, she does housework, writes emails and talks on the phone to avoid facing her work. In the past, she’s played 30 games of solitaire before typing a first sentence.

Brian Brodeur’s How a Poem Happens is particularly good this week, with a look at the process behind the writing of  Tony Hoagland’s “Lucky.”

I believe in such a thing as getting lucky sometimes. I also believe that one of the gifts we cultivate as working poets is the instinct for where a poem can be found—the coordination of details and dimensions, the angularity with which a tone can be established or how a story can be positioned, to best catch the light. In this poem, (to me) that special angle is the exposure of how Power—not gender or familial attachment—is at the core of the interaction.

Brodeur always picks good poems, but sometimes poets give only cursory answers to his questions. This week, Hoagland delivers.

Junot Diaz describes the five-year struggle behind his first novel. Things got so bad at one point that he made plans to return to school to start another career. Via Maud.

Every morning I’m up with the alarm at five, out of bed after two punches on the snooze button. I head for my study, and thus begins my writing time.  Most of the time I have no idea what I will be working on, or what I will do with this one or two hours. What never ceases to amaze me is that something always happens.

The muse is great, but I find that most of my attention is spent on just the words themselves–switching them out, switching them back. Playing with syntax or the sound of the line. This is fun to me once I get into it–like my own private crossword puzzle. And I know there was a famous writer who said that he might spend a whole day worrying over a comma, and at the end of the ordeal put the damn thing back in where it was to begin with.

This morning I was in the final stages of a poem–the point at which I can literally remember exactly why I chose one word over another. I can even remember how the poem used to be–what came frirst, what came last, where the original impulse is and if it reains in the final drafts. I’ll even take the poem away from my desk and bring it around ith me–in my gradebook if I am teaching, in the passenger seat of the car while I wait in carpool line. I feel like I will never get tired of staring at it, comparing this word against another to see which it best.

All this is remarkably like painting a room. I have lived in a new house for nearly two years now, and many walls are primed and ready for paint colors that I have yet to decide on. I feel like I should have some grand vision for the whole whouse before I take even a single step. I want everything to go well together, for the colors of each room to ‘flow’–I don’t even have a vocabu;ary for the way I want the paint in the house to look. I forced myself though, this week, to take a step–I would paint my sons’ bathroom white.

Have you ever been to a paint store? The walls are lined with bookmark-sized strips of colors with wonderful names–Concord Gray, Pensacola Mist, etc. For a while I used only paint colors that had an author’s name worked into the color–Hawthorne Red, for example, was an accent wall in a bedroom of long ago. The other half of the wall space is devoted to the whites–linen white, blue white, creame, parchment–pink, brown, beige versions of white. It is really impossible to make an informed choice. If I were a decorator I would buy samples and paint the wall many different whites, stare at the swatches at different hours of the day to get just the right look.

For a poem, I am willing to make that sort of sacrifice. Didn’t Bishop wait sixteen years for just the right word before she would declare her great poem “The Moose” completed?  For a bathroom, not so much. I chose Decorator’s White. I finished in one day, the brushes are soaking in the sink. For the next room, if I feel bold, I may choose beige.

I believe in being exceptionally loose and free in the first draft. I believe in overwriting. I believe it’s easier to cut than to add.

To this end, I’d like offer you one of my favorite poems. To me, it’s “about” revision: Emily Dickinson’s “The Props Assist the House,” from the Poetry Foundation’s website.

The Sun Magazine interviews Wendell Berry. Aside from his usual topics of ecology and economy, Berry touches on his method as a writer:

Fearnside: In your own writing, you seem to confront head-on the speed and thoughtlessness of contemporary society by your deliberate, thoughtful style. Do you consciously write this way?

Berry: I did make up my mind at some time that instead of trying to serve my purposes by rhetorical artifice or personal attacks, I would try to make as much sense as I could. If your cause doesn’t make sense, why defend it? Writing is a test of sense. It’s an exposure of your ideas to your own scrutiny, and then to the scrutiny of other people.

“Gangel: You mentioned before you get inspiration from conversations overheard in the streets. Where else?

Ashbery: I’m very much of a magpie as far as reading goes. I read anything which comes to my hand. National Enquirer, Dear Abby, a magazine at the dentist, a Victorian novel. I don’t have a program in anything, as a matter of fact.

Someone remarked about an obscene passage in a poem. I replied that this shocked him not because it was there, but because there were not more of them.

There is an American feeling that if you do one thing, you’ve got to do that and nothing else. It goes against my grain.

Poetry includes anything and everything.

Gangel: Do you find it easy to relate to people?

Ashbery: Yes I do. I am a very gregarious person. This often surprises people, because my poetry does have a reputation for being aloof and antihuman. But I’m quite the reverse. I enjoy talking with just about anybody. My students, for instance. We get along very well socially. I don’t believe in closing myself off from anybody or anything.

My best writing gets done when I’m being distracted by people who are calling me or errands that I have to do. Those things seem to help the creative process, in my case.”

–From Sue Gangel, “An Interview with John Ashbery” (originally printed in the San Francisco Review of Books [November 1977], rep. in Joe David Bellamy, Ed. American Poetry Observed: Poets On Their Work (Urbana: U Illinois P, 1984), 14.

“I am interested very much in debased and demotic forms of expression…. They often seem so much more moving than something that is beautifully phrased and composed. The crudeness of a Hollywood sound adventure picture on the one hand and a sort of high-flown translation from the Greek on the other were both elements that attracted me and not entirely just to make fun of them either, but to sort of purify the language of the tribe.”

–John Ashbery, on the film Where the North Begins, and its influence on his plays The Philosopher and The Compromise. (American Poetry Review, May-June 1984) courtesy of the Ashbery Resource Center.

“Hart [Crane], as I later discovered, would have been meditating over that particular poem for months or even years, scribbling lines on pieces of paper that he carried in his pockets and meanwhile waiting for the moment of genuine inspiration when he could put it all together…. Hart tried to charm his inspiration out of its hiding place with a Cuban rumba and a pitcher of hard cider…. He drank in Village speakeasies and Brooklyn waterfront dives; he insulted everyone within hearing or shouted that he was Christopher Marlowe…. By the following afternoon all the outrageous things he had done at night became merely funny, became an epic misadventure to be embroidered—‘And then I began throwing furniture out the window,’ he would say with an enormous chuckle. Everybody would laugh and Hart would pound the table, calling for another bottle of wine. At a certain stage in drunkenness he gave himself and others the illusion of completely painless brilliance; words poured out of him, puns, metaphors, epigrams, visions; but soon the high spirits would be mingled with obsessions—‘See that man staring at us, I think he’s a detective’”

—Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. The website was created by Dustin Kidd for American Studies at the University of Virginia.

“Hart Crane had an infuriating way of writing a poem. Typically, after drinking copiously, he would put a 78 on a hand-cranked Victrola and play it ‘a dozen, two dozen, three dozen times’ while alternately banging away on a typewriter and loudly declaiming the same line of verse repeatedly. To his friends’ horror, the Victrola was indispensable — Crane claimed it gave him ‘intimacy with la Muse’—and he peremptorily refused every polite request to change his habits or at least to confine his cacophonous writing sessions to daylight hours.”

—Brian Reed,
Hart Crane’s Victrola. 
Modernism/Modernity—Volume 7, Number 1, January 2000, pp. 99-125

I’ll admit the websites are a little sketchy; that’s what you get when try to link to actual books from the internet, but the stories were too good to pass up.

“No, well one of the things that’s very curious is that I seem to have two methods of writing. One is the craftsperson method, which now seems, because I haven’t done it a while, very dear to me, in which the words are labored over; and a sense of agency is created by that process. You actually have a sense of yourself as making the poem. When you write very rapidly, when I write very rapidly, I lose that sense that the poem is mine. I can’t think where it came from. But it’s usually done quite quickly, and altered very little…. [There are some poems] that were over and over and over revised; taken apart, put together again, but in a very compressed period of time. And then there are poems in which there are recalcitrant words, phrases, things that I feel could be better…. 

I think that it’s—in saying to write, you’re going to write that which most concerns you, which most quickens your mind, and then to turn those subjects over with as resourceful and complex a touch as possible. I am endlessly irritated by the reading of my poems as autobiography. I draw on the materials my life has given me, but what interests me isn’t that they happen to me, what interests me is that they seem, as I look around, paradigmatic. We’re all born mortal. We have to contend with the idea of mortality. We all, at some point, love, with the risks involved, the vulnerabilities involved, the disappointments and great thrills of passion. This is common human experience, so what you use is the self as a laboratory, in which to practice, master, what seem to you central human dilemmas.”

–Louise Glück, in an interview with Grace Cavalieri for the radio series “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress” during the Library’s bicentennial celebration in 2000. 

For more: “In the Magnificent Region of Courage: An Interview with Louise Glück”

“At any given time, I have two things on my mind: a theme that interests me and a problem of verbal form, meter, diction, etc. The theme looks for the right form; the form looks for the right theme. When the two come together, I am able to start writing…. Usually, of course, one starts at the beginning and works through to the end. Sometimes, though, one starts with a certain line in mind, perhaps a last line. One starts, I think, with a certain idea of thematic organization, but this usually alters during the process of writing….

I never write when I’m drunk. Why should one need aids? The Muse is a high-spirited girl who doesn’t like to be brutally or coarsely wooed. And she doesn’t like slavish devotion—then she lies…. Poetry is not self-expression. Each of us, of course, has a unique perspective which we hope to communicate. We hope that someone reading it will say, “Of course, I knew that all the time but never realized it before.” On the whole I agree here withChesterton, who said, ‘The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs.’…. [O]ne mustn’t be bohemian!”

You caught me: the ellipses, for the most part, signal where I’ve taken out questions. For more: “The Art of Poetry No. 17: W.H. Auden” in the Paris Review. The interviewer is unidentified. 

This is how you know you are, if not old, at least older than you used to be: you are anxious to leave a perfectly good flip-cup tournament to get back home, where your half-finished sestina draft awaits.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon trying to write, and failing. (How about a sestina on pot-likker? The tea rooms of Atlanta hang open like mouths…) Teaism’s upper floor had not one, not two, but three small wailing children, and the miso sauce on the sweet potato salad was greasy. (A sestina on the better woman? She knows each olive’s name as she pits it by hand…) The cafe at the Phillips Gallery had locked up its outdoor patio, and the tea-bag of chamomile was pathetic after being spoiled at Method. (A sestina on the Pacman frog? I want to choke-choke-choke the field mice down…)

When you’re trying to write, and failing, every small irritant is magnified. That blister on my left foot sticks to my sandal. This legal pad’s binding isn’t as good and gluey as the last one. It’s too hot in the sun. It’s too cold in the shade. I shouldn’t have eaten that handful of pecans after lunch. When is the last episode of The Wire going to come? How am I going to make a living as a writer if I can’t complete one lousy poem?

People ask me how to know when a sestina draft is going to “take.” There are some appropriately craft-based markers: sound, flexible end-word choices, the potential for a twist as story tires in stanza four. But the truth is that my best indicator comes much sooner, at the end of line one. As I pen in that final syllable of the first ten I either grin to myself–quick, involuntary–or I don’t. I either get a little crush on the poem’s starting premise, or I don’t. And if there’s no crush, I won’t make it all the way through. Sestinas are just too damn tiring. They are the jigsaw puzzles of the poetry world.    

So it wasn’t until around 4 PM, three lousy and abandoned drafts in, that I wrote a first line and thought. Yeah. Yeah. But I only had a couple of hours to work before a best friend’s going-away party beckoned. Jump-cut to flip-cup at the Bottom Line, complete with tournament brackets and a DJ spinning the sweet sounds of 1998 (“Hypnotize”? Anyone?). Five longtime friends in matching blue t-shirts bearing the proud logo of “Abe Froman, Sausage King of Chicago” (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? Anyone?), lining up cups of Bud Lite on a table carefully primed with cup-slop to increase the surface tension.

And one grumpy poet standing off to the side, fidgeting with her shawl. Missing her sestina. Because as annoying as those little formal bastards are, they are also addictive. You can’t leave one half-finished. Nor can you talk about the draft, because talking about it might smother it. Nor, for that matter, did my friends come to the Bottom Line to talk enjambment. They came to sing along, very loudly, to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Which is not only an equally honorable pursuit, but one far more apropos for a Saturday night.

That’s the thing about poetry: sometimes, it makes you sooooo lame.

“My writing process is a bit odd, because I work with lots of fragments (from different poems) for a long time before anything coheres into a presentable piece. I may start with a line that I know will appear in the middle of the poem, so I write it down in the middle of the page (college-ruled notebook paper, usually). Other lines may gather around that original, or I may skip to the beginning and work until I am stymied, at which point I will turn to another collection of fragments-too early to honor them with the term ‘draft –and work on them until I reach a dead end there, too. The process is similar to assembling a jigsaw puzzle, and yet I don’t skip around willy nilly–I’ll tend a particular corner of the poem-to-be until I’ve exhausted both it and me. In time–days, weeks, months–a draft will emerge, and then another, and another, until I can see the entire picture, and then the polishing begins. It’s a nerve-wracking way to work, because I have to dwell in possibility, walking through the valley of the shadow of failure, for a long time before anything happens that others could call Process. But I’ve found it’s the best way for me to cultivate the unconscious connections a bit longer, and it often happens that several poems will complete themselves in the charmed span of a single week.”

–Rita Dove, in an interview with by Robert McDowell for Poets.org.

For more: “Poets at the Dance: Rita Dove in Conversation”

“I do know that one of the best incubating times for me and beating out the beats of a poem, is on long drives.  And my wife always knows, because driving on long journeys with the spouse is very stilling.  She sees my fingers on the steering wheel, beating out the thing. That is true.  Many, many poems that I have conceived of and started are in that shut-eyed, well not literally shut-eyed.  But you know how you go 50 miles before you waken up. The car element; that is certainly one trance that is there.  The other is… I have to say, going to this cottage which is an old 19th century gate lodge and it brings me back to that first house, in a way, that I was in because it used to have a latch and the sound of a latch was like the sound of the primal world.  I felt psychologically, physically safe in it.  I felt that my first self was guaranteed by this place.  I always found it conducive to writing.  In fact, so satisfactory, that I almost didn’t need to write. So the car, and the cottage, and now the attic. 

I used to very much like claustrophobic conditions – facing the wall with a low-set ceiling.  In fact in the cottage we had this lovely, old, low ceiling and one of the different attitudes… one of the things that my wife and I disagreed about was she liked the idea of a skylight.  And I said, no, no, no, no, no. Keep the hutch of the hatch down.  So when I was in Harvard one time, and I came back, and I went upstairs in the cottage – ooooh, there was a skylight. Actually, it was a tremendous change for me and it was something to do with getting near fifty, I think.  I lifted up my eyes to the heavens and… I have a light in my attic at home  – a door into the dark; a door into the light is what we’re after now. 

….I used to find chain smoking very helpful, actually. I’m sure many writers in the room have stopped smoking and there’s a crisis.”

–Seamus Heaney, in an interview with Dennis O’Driscoll.

For more: “Readings & Conversations: Seamus Heaney with Dennis O’Driscoll“

“[A]s a writer, I’m very, very slow. I’ll take any excuse whatever to get away from writing, because I’ve made it so painful a process. Between picking it up and laying it down, it sometimes takes me five years to finish off a poem. And whenever I go back to work on an unfinished poem, I do what Dylan Thomas used to do; I have to write it all out from the very beginning, and come up to where the next line is going to be, providing I can think of it. I never do leave any gaps to be filled in later…. I write so horribly slowly that by the time I do advance, by the time I do go on ahead in the poem, I’m satisfied with what I’ve finished so far…. [I]t’s far from being automatic, which isn’t to say that there isn’t a lot of the irrational in my writing, just as there must be in everybody’s. I think that one reason why I’m so slow is because I sit there half dreaming, letting rhymes suggest idiotic ideas to me, trying to stay loose and irrational.” 

— Richard Wilbur, in an interview with Gregory Fitz Gerald and William Heyen for Modern Poetry Studies (Vol. 1, No. 2 (1970), 57-67). After being so scholarly, I have to admit that I picked up the interview in Conversations with Richard Wilbur, ed. William Butts.