[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.

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.

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.

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.

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”