When I was
a young poet I used to work at poems sequentially and with great patience. I
would write in the morning soon after waking. I don’t remember how the poems
came to me. What I remember is working at them.
All
morning as I worked I’d pick up older folders one-by-one and open them and work
on whatever draft was on top. The folders included poems in various degrees of
completion. Sometime there would be 20 or 30 of them on my desk.
After two
or three days working on the initial handwritten draft I’d type up (I’m talking
1979 here) a first script in 12-point courier and place the typed page on top
of the earlier handwritten drafts. There was no other choice. Courier was the
only typeface I had.
Once I had
the typed draft I returned to making notes by hand with a pen or pencil. I marked
up the draft, substituting, clarifying, rearranging. I’d seen library exhibits
of multiple drafts by dead masters like Keats, Whitman, and Yeats. I knew that
this was often the way poets of the past worked. I believed in continuity.
Sometimes
I flipped back a few pages and returned to an earlier draft and salvaged a line
I’d ruined by revision. Other times I forged restlessly forward typing a new
version, adding the new words, line breaks, sections moved to a new spot.
This
process is not foreign to anyone who is serious about poetry. It’s not the only
form of composition, but it might still be the best way to slow language down
and make it count, as I believe it should in poetry.
The
process was much like the composting I do to add nutrients to our garden. Lots
of strange stuff goes into that silver can on our counter (daily life). What
comes out the next year (writing poetry) is dark humus that when spread, grows
good things. Within those folders my early poems built up images and lines like
topsoil over weeks, months, years.
At some
point I’d feel good about what was within the folder and I’d pull it out, type
a final clean copy, fold it up with three or four more poems I felt good about,
and send the packet out to engage the ongoing conversation of among writers and
editors about poetry.
When the
poems came back (which they more than often did) they never slept in the house.
I sent the next batch of poems back out in the same day’s mail. I often waited
many months for their return. I was much more patient and persistent back then.
That was before the rationalizations about “simultaneous submissions.”
Today my
process is very different. I abandoned the “real” manila folders for virtual
ones about the time I bought my first computer, around 1982. Today I still
revise, but I’ll often wait to the very end of the process before I print out a
final version of a poem. All the work I’ve done on a poem is lost forever in
hyperspace. There are no tracks in the sand to show me where my mind was a
month ago, much less a year or a decade.
I trust that the current version is as good as all others that came
before. I follow the blinking curser into the next line, image, or whole poem.
I’ve
noticed that I work more often with groups of poems now, poems that fit
together not because they might share a style but now instead share a clear theme
or a character or a narrative impulse. I think that in the old days I was more
interested in the minutiae of poetics. Back then I was simply a poet. I didn’t
write prose and poetry like I do now. I think all the prose I’ve written in the
last fifteen years has spread my sensibility out into the vast floodplain of
writing. I no longer write as if I’m cutting a deep channel through the bedrock
of a single genre.
What I’ve
written about here is the process of my writing, but I’ve also thought a great
deal—maybe too much—about the moment of conception, about how poetry arrives
out of the great swirling mass of day-to-day experience, and I’ve worried like
all poets about whether the impulse will stay once it arrives.
William
Stafford had his famous “golden thread” he pulled every morning, unraveling (or
raveling?) the mundane into poetry. He pulled the thread for fifty years.
Some poets
claim it’s a sharp sound or cadence that brings poetry out of hiding or hibernation;
others say poetry comes from remembering a brief story condensed and ordered. Some
say poetic utterance depends on silence, and that the ancient muse always waits
for stillness before the leap to language. Yeats thought to write a poem he
must “lie down where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and
bone shop of the heart.”
For my
friend Cathy Smith Bowers (newly appointed poet laureate of North Carolina) a
poem grows out of what she calls an “abiding image.” Something visual sticks
with Cathy until she works it and works it. Soon other images, bits of
narrative, metaphors accrue around her initial image. It’s worked well for her.
Her Book of Minutes is a trove, a deep well, a larder.
For me the
arrival of the poetry impulse is spatial, like faults moving against one
another somewhere deep down in my daily conscious. A new period of poetry comes
on like a tremor, like a slow roller. When the plates start rattling in the
cupboard I know poetry is on the way. If they are large tremors the accompanying
tectonics will lead to an intense period of activity, and I’ll leave prose
behind for awhile.
I’ve been
lucky. In spite of vast and endless prose projects, there are still
earthquakes. Poetry still comes around. In China I felt the shaking. I came
home with six good poems about my experiences there. The mystery of why and how
we write is as deep as what comes of it.
Love this!
Posted by: Cynthia Huntington | March 05, 2010 at 11:35 AM
I second Cynthia's comment. This is a brilliant and generous description of how you work and how your approach to writing has evolved. This entire week has been fantastic. Thank you.
Posted by: Marissa Despain | March 05, 2010 at 01:30 PM
Another terrific post - and a shout-out to the good old days when we had to work this way. I still do something similar - printing out a version, writing all over it, transferring the revisions to the computer and printing out a new clean copy, then doing it all over again. It's nice not to have to type everything manually, though.
Posted by: Laura Orem | March 05, 2010 at 01:39 PM
I agree with all that's been said about this post and this week of posts. And John, I remember when you told me to never let a poem or story or whatever "sleep in your house." Such good advice.
Posted by: Stacey Harwood | March 05, 2010 at 04:21 PM