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- Apr 12, 2005
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1. When did you start writing poetry?
In grade school, the kids used to snicker over the rudest limericks they could find and try to write ones sillier or nastier still, usually about each other or a teacher. It was great fun, and you could rib a kid with a really good one for weeks. I got a kick out of those and sometimes got kicked back.
2. What other writing do you do regularly?
I've written a lot of marketing materials like brochures, catalogs, business plans, and web copy. Long ago, I wrote articles for a local life-and-leisure rag. I'd like to work my way back to writing short stories again, but apparently not enough to do more than think about it.
3. Do you think of yourself primarily as a poet?
When it comes to creative writing, yes. I put little effort into other forms, though I enjoy reading widely.
4. Why do you write poetry?
I write poetry because I have always been in awe of the magic in words, and find poetry to contain the most beautiful and challenging ways to experience and express that magic. When prose rises to its heights, it tends to do so by expressing a poetic essence and control. Poetry also has a musical nature that helps it span the senses. Poetry presents multiple challenges that provide multiple opportunities to create something marvelous at once. Its potential means that even at its most relaxed, it has an essential tension I find consistently intriguing.
There is also something to be said for the line, "I write so that I know what I think." Poetry lets me capture my spirit and the world around me and put it into some kind of order. If the unexamined life is not worth living, poetry gives me the chance to examine very closely indeed.
5. How does writing poetry relate with your other writing?
A "word sense" is helpful in all kinds of writing. Poetry provides constant practice in refining one. When I write marketing copy selling people on a line of furniture, I often need to evoke more than describe. And to evoke, I need to empathize. Some of what I have written, for example, has been directed to investors whose first language is not English.
Oddly enough, it's sometimes not sufficient to have the perfect words, because they will be pointed toward a difference audience than the one you've got. Sometimes the perfect word is actually one less artful, precise, information-packed, even less clear ... it is the one that is more simply, well, digestible. The same problem comes up in poetry. If you write only for yourself, it won't move anyone no matter how good it is. I believe constantly trafficking in nuance and questions of audience, as one does in poetry, is good practice in handling difficult problems in communication.
6. Beyond Absolute Write, what is your publication/performance history?
Nothing to speak of. I have written marketing materials, speeches, some small bits of business on a textbook, and the like. I've written SEO articles. But I don't take an active hand with what I would consider my creative writing.
7. How often do you write poems?
It varies widely. I don't have a set schedule, but admire the thought of one.
8. What goals, if any, do you have for your poetry?
I would like it to reflect my intentions more thoroughly and translucently. And I would like it to reflect more and more reliably interesting intentions.
9. Do you set out to write a poem, does it compel you to write it, or something else?
A little of everything. I'll take a poem any way I can get it. While I often put aside time to commit to writing, sometimes a poetic image or idea simply intrudes on my consciousness colorfully enough that I know I'd better not let it slip, because the next one might not be as good.
10. What formal, semantic, or thematic traits do you prefer to use in your poems?
I am writing very experimentally now, actively digging into different styles, energy levels, and emotional registers to see what I can do with them. So I'm inconsistent. I do see myself refining and discarding somewhat, but am not sure what the end result will be. I think I know what I am moving away from more than what I am moving toward.
I read about someone asking some literary figure how to become a better writer and getting told, "Read all the Faulkner you can, and then all the Hemingway you can get your hands on to clean it out of your system." I do find myself steadily gaining respect for an artful yet translucent use of straightforward, accessible language. I hope to grow in my ability to craft poems along those lines.
11. Which usually comes first: Topic/idea, form, words? Other?
Sometimes I choose the poem and sometimes it chooses me. And sometimes, other.
I have turned developed thoughts and concerns into outlines and then filled them out until they became poems. I have been suddenly struck by an image, phrase, or strong feeling and found myself writing a poem around it. And I have written poems as a sort of accident. Sitting down to write one, I ram my head into a wall over it for hours, going nowhere, maybe left with a piteous few phrases I can't connect. Creatively exhausted, sore-bottomed, and altogether disgusted, I'm suddenly off like lightning on a new subject I hadn't given a second of thought to. Sometimes I have to crumple myself up and throw myself away before I'm worth anything.
12. Do you revise? Right away, later on? How do you decide when you've finished with a poem?
I revise a lot, even obsessively. Always right away, almost always later on. I'm finished with a poem when I can't figure out how to improve it, but there are different levels to that. I may be able to improve it later, when time has given me a bit of perspective or even disinterest in it. So it's rare that I feel confident a poem is truly finished. I tend to reserve just enough hope to keep me returning to poems long after they're written.
13. How did you come to be interested in poetry?
Perhaps by not having English as a first language. For a while as a kid, I spoke German and English at the same time, not knowing which word came from which language or what word order was correct. I'd get very confused by it and sometimes mortified by my public gaffes. Sorting it all out made me have to think about how language was made and how to use it in my favor. Is phonics poetry? I believe they both share a kinship to puzzles.
But perhaps more by Dr. Seuss. I was in awe of Seuss books. You could never get them from the library because they were always checked out, and they were too expensive for my family to buy. I was astounded by every page. Seuss books taught me the pure joy in words.
14. What particular poem or poet first attracted you to poetry?
Again, Dr. Seuss. Later, in secondary school, Wordsworth and Wilfred Owen.
15. What poems, poets, movements or eras have influenced you as a poet: which do you particularly enjoy, admire, or aspire toward?
I have made less concerted effort in studying poetry than I have prose. Having read poetry widely but not with any kind of plan, I have been perhaps more impacted than influenced by most poetry.
From the West, the poet I've read the most of and the most often is Wallace Stevens. I like the way he stresses imagination creating the world. My poems often have people struggling with imaginations misaligned with the world.
A lot of what has influenced me has been the Taoism and Buddhism I have read. Many of my poems are about losing or righting a balance. People are tipping off the edge of something or scrambling to find their way back. They are often uncomfortable. I might not judge them, yet will set them up in positions to be judged and, hopefully, recognized as expressing something readers can see -- and maybe even judge -- in themselves. I like poetry that leaves one with a question. Eastern philosophy often stresses psychic regulation, or "spiritual ecology," as I read a translator putting it recently. I like to engage with how people achieve, come back to, or fall away from balance. In Christianity, The Fall happened once. In Buddhism and Taoism, it happens every moment. There is enough terror and grace for a lot of poetry in that.
16. What single poem of yours would you recommend to someone who had never read your work?
I would probably recommend she not take any particular poem as a fair definition of my writing. So many of my poems have been in drastically different voices and aspire to such different things that it makes little sense to judge them against each other. Is light verse inherently better or worse than weightier stuff?
If I had to choose a single one, it would probably be Chrysalis, a darker piece with a closing stanza which I feel is among the best I've written. But it's not the one I sing in the shower.
17. What are your thoughts on poetry today: its function, future, direction, relevance?
Discussion that broad fills whole books!
I'll just say that I believe poetry removes itself from the public sphere when too self-absorbed, which could -- and perhaps should -- be the death of it. It needs to reach out to people of every kind if we expect it not to disappear.
Too much poetry reads like one poet showing his new puzzle to another. When each comes up with enough puzzles, he comes out with a book of puzzles that only the other would buy. Then they both call each other geniuses and begin again.
No wonder John Q. Public tunes out. Poetry isn't written for him. It's out of the habit of being written for him. And he knows it. We will need to start writing about every kind of person, about real things again, and in language which communicates rather than surrenders to an empty pursuit of style and acceptable subject, frame of reference, reader. If we want him back. If we don't, we will deserve the irrelevance and voicelessness we so assiduously cultivate for our art.
18. What, in your view, makes a written/spoken work a poem?
Poetry's unit is the line, not, as in prose, the sentence. This gives it the chance to play with line breaks, a manipulation not available to the sentence. This characteristic harks back to its descent from song, which existed before written language, and recalls other virtues it shares with song, such as meter, rhythm, and rhyme. You can not only listen to poetry; some of it, you can dance to. Prose is not as organized. It breaks apart into strange mouthfuls.
Poetry also has other common characteristics, which tend to bring about and reinforce each other's use. Its compactness encourages precision. Even good prose has a lot of breathing room in comparison to poetry. It can be edited with a facile looseness that would destroy a poem. Poetry's compactness also encourages the use of figurative language and suggestion to bring into a small space more meaning than prose would allow. Prose is less pressed to fill its space. Figurative language and suggestion encourage resonance, the poem's effect not ceasing after its reading has ended.
Many things work together to define poetry, but it's a loose definition. Some poems don't rhyme; some aren't musical; some are fairly prolix, some create figuration or resonance only by what they leave out, not what they include.
Everyone seems to know what you're talking about when you say a passage reads too much like prose. We may not instinctively know what to put in, but we can tell when something is missing.
19. What do you like about your own poetry?
That the better poems tend to look you in the eye and be accessible. You don't have to know Sanskrit to figure them out or collect all the different colored keys to open the secret door to the monster gun. You can play right now. If you look in, somebody's generally looking out at you.
20. What would you say to someone who wants to learn to write poetry well?
Learn language well. Poetry is about such small things in such perfect balance. You can't be stumbling about. If you don't know how to use commas or what a clause is yet, it's never too late to learn. But if you mess up a smooth read because you don't know how to punctuate, it may be too late to ever get that reader back again. Don't come in already making excuses for yourself -- greet the reader at the top of your game. He *will* be judging you. Count on it. And you deserve it. What else could he do?
Read a lot, probably much more than you'd like. It is hard to know what's cliche if you haven't read widely. It's also hard to know what you like or dislike if you haven't been exposed to much, or how to do it if you haven't seen anything like it done.
Get in the habit of thinking about writing when you read. In one ear and out the other is no good. When a passage has an effect on you, figure out why. Writing is a heist and the reader is the bank. How are you being set up?
Remember it's about people. Technical virtuosity, should you achieve it, can still ring hollow. Don't look for polite approval, but to make a poem stick in someone.
And try not to use the word "translucent" too often. It gets annoying.
In grade school, the kids used to snicker over the rudest limericks they could find and try to write ones sillier or nastier still, usually about each other or a teacher. It was great fun, and you could rib a kid with a really good one for weeks. I got a kick out of those and sometimes got kicked back.
2. What other writing do you do regularly?
I've written a lot of marketing materials like brochures, catalogs, business plans, and web copy. Long ago, I wrote articles for a local life-and-leisure rag. I'd like to work my way back to writing short stories again, but apparently not enough to do more than think about it.
3. Do you think of yourself primarily as a poet?
When it comes to creative writing, yes. I put little effort into other forms, though I enjoy reading widely.
4. Why do you write poetry?
I write poetry because I have always been in awe of the magic in words, and find poetry to contain the most beautiful and challenging ways to experience and express that magic. When prose rises to its heights, it tends to do so by expressing a poetic essence and control. Poetry also has a musical nature that helps it span the senses. Poetry presents multiple challenges that provide multiple opportunities to create something marvelous at once. Its potential means that even at its most relaxed, it has an essential tension I find consistently intriguing.
There is also something to be said for the line, "I write so that I know what I think." Poetry lets me capture my spirit and the world around me and put it into some kind of order. If the unexamined life is not worth living, poetry gives me the chance to examine very closely indeed.
5. How does writing poetry relate with your other writing?
A "word sense" is helpful in all kinds of writing. Poetry provides constant practice in refining one. When I write marketing copy selling people on a line of furniture, I often need to evoke more than describe. And to evoke, I need to empathize. Some of what I have written, for example, has been directed to investors whose first language is not English.
Oddly enough, it's sometimes not sufficient to have the perfect words, because they will be pointed toward a difference audience than the one you've got. Sometimes the perfect word is actually one less artful, precise, information-packed, even less clear ... it is the one that is more simply, well, digestible. The same problem comes up in poetry. If you write only for yourself, it won't move anyone no matter how good it is. I believe constantly trafficking in nuance and questions of audience, as one does in poetry, is good practice in handling difficult problems in communication.
6. Beyond Absolute Write, what is your publication/performance history?
Nothing to speak of. I have written marketing materials, speeches, some small bits of business on a textbook, and the like. I've written SEO articles. But I don't take an active hand with what I would consider my creative writing.
7. How often do you write poems?
It varies widely. I don't have a set schedule, but admire the thought of one.
8. What goals, if any, do you have for your poetry?
I would like it to reflect my intentions more thoroughly and translucently. And I would like it to reflect more and more reliably interesting intentions.
9. Do you set out to write a poem, does it compel you to write it, or something else?
A little of everything. I'll take a poem any way I can get it. While I often put aside time to commit to writing, sometimes a poetic image or idea simply intrudes on my consciousness colorfully enough that I know I'd better not let it slip, because the next one might not be as good.
10. What formal, semantic, or thematic traits do you prefer to use in your poems?
I am writing very experimentally now, actively digging into different styles, energy levels, and emotional registers to see what I can do with them. So I'm inconsistent. I do see myself refining and discarding somewhat, but am not sure what the end result will be. I think I know what I am moving away from more than what I am moving toward.
I read about someone asking some literary figure how to become a better writer and getting told, "Read all the Faulkner you can, and then all the Hemingway you can get your hands on to clean it out of your system." I do find myself steadily gaining respect for an artful yet translucent use of straightforward, accessible language. I hope to grow in my ability to craft poems along those lines.
11. Which usually comes first: Topic/idea, form, words? Other?
Sometimes I choose the poem and sometimes it chooses me. And sometimes, other.
I have turned developed thoughts and concerns into outlines and then filled them out until they became poems. I have been suddenly struck by an image, phrase, or strong feeling and found myself writing a poem around it. And I have written poems as a sort of accident. Sitting down to write one, I ram my head into a wall over it for hours, going nowhere, maybe left with a piteous few phrases I can't connect. Creatively exhausted, sore-bottomed, and altogether disgusted, I'm suddenly off like lightning on a new subject I hadn't given a second of thought to. Sometimes I have to crumple myself up and throw myself away before I'm worth anything.
12. Do you revise? Right away, later on? How do you decide when you've finished with a poem?
I revise a lot, even obsessively. Always right away, almost always later on. I'm finished with a poem when I can't figure out how to improve it, but there are different levels to that. I may be able to improve it later, when time has given me a bit of perspective or even disinterest in it. So it's rare that I feel confident a poem is truly finished. I tend to reserve just enough hope to keep me returning to poems long after they're written.
13. How did you come to be interested in poetry?
Perhaps by not having English as a first language. For a while as a kid, I spoke German and English at the same time, not knowing which word came from which language or what word order was correct. I'd get very confused by it and sometimes mortified by my public gaffes. Sorting it all out made me have to think about how language was made and how to use it in my favor. Is phonics poetry? I believe they both share a kinship to puzzles.
But perhaps more by Dr. Seuss. I was in awe of Seuss books. You could never get them from the library because they were always checked out, and they were too expensive for my family to buy. I was astounded by every page. Seuss books taught me the pure joy in words.
14. What particular poem or poet first attracted you to poetry?
Again, Dr. Seuss. Later, in secondary school, Wordsworth and Wilfred Owen.
15. What poems, poets, movements or eras have influenced you as a poet: which do you particularly enjoy, admire, or aspire toward?
I have made less concerted effort in studying poetry than I have prose. Having read poetry widely but not with any kind of plan, I have been perhaps more impacted than influenced by most poetry.
From the West, the poet I've read the most of and the most often is Wallace Stevens. I like the way he stresses imagination creating the world. My poems often have people struggling with imaginations misaligned with the world.
A lot of what has influenced me has been the Taoism and Buddhism I have read. Many of my poems are about losing or righting a balance. People are tipping off the edge of something or scrambling to find their way back. They are often uncomfortable. I might not judge them, yet will set them up in positions to be judged and, hopefully, recognized as expressing something readers can see -- and maybe even judge -- in themselves. I like poetry that leaves one with a question. Eastern philosophy often stresses psychic regulation, or "spiritual ecology," as I read a translator putting it recently. I like to engage with how people achieve, come back to, or fall away from balance. In Christianity, The Fall happened once. In Buddhism and Taoism, it happens every moment. There is enough terror and grace for a lot of poetry in that.
16. What single poem of yours would you recommend to someone who had never read your work?
I would probably recommend she not take any particular poem as a fair definition of my writing. So many of my poems have been in drastically different voices and aspire to such different things that it makes little sense to judge them against each other. Is light verse inherently better or worse than weightier stuff?
If I had to choose a single one, it would probably be Chrysalis, a darker piece with a closing stanza which I feel is among the best I've written. But it's not the one I sing in the shower.
17. What are your thoughts on poetry today: its function, future, direction, relevance?
Discussion that broad fills whole books!
I'll just say that I believe poetry removes itself from the public sphere when too self-absorbed, which could -- and perhaps should -- be the death of it. It needs to reach out to people of every kind if we expect it not to disappear.
Too much poetry reads like one poet showing his new puzzle to another. When each comes up with enough puzzles, he comes out with a book of puzzles that only the other would buy. Then they both call each other geniuses and begin again.
No wonder John Q. Public tunes out. Poetry isn't written for him. It's out of the habit of being written for him. And he knows it. We will need to start writing about every kind of person, about real things again, and in language which communicates rather than surrenders to an empty pursuit of style and acceptable subject, frame of reference, reader. If we want him back. If we don't, we will deserve the irrelevance and voicelessness we so assiduously cultivate for our art.
18. What, in your view, makes a written/spoken work a poem?
Poetry's unit is the line, not, as in prose, the sentence. This gives it the chance to play with line breaks, a manipulation not available to the sentence. This characteristic harks back to its descent from song, which existed before written language, and recalls other virtues it shares with song, such as meter, rhythm, and rhyme. You can not only listen to poetry; some of it, you can dance to. Prose is not as organized. It breaks apart into strange mouthfuls.
Poetry also has other common characteristics, which tend to bring about and reinforce each other's use. Its compactness encourages precision. Even good prose has a lot of breathing room in comparison to poetry. It can be edited with a facile looseness that would destroy a poem. Poetry's compactness also encourages the use of figurative language and suggestion to bring into a small space more meaning than prose would allow. Prose is less pressed to fill its space. Figurative language and suggestion encourage resonance, the poem's effect not ceasing after its reading has ended.
Many things work together to define poetry, but it's a loose definition. Some poems don't rhyme; some aren't musical; some are fairly prolix, some create figuration or resonance only by what they leave out, not what they include.
Everyone seems to know what you're talking about when you say a passage reads too much like prose. We may not instinctively know what to put in, but we can tell when something is missing.
19. What do you like about your own poetry?
That the better poems tend to look you in the eye and be accessible. You don't have to know Sanskrit to figure them out or collect all the different colored keys to open the secret door to the monster gun. You can play right now. If you look in, somebody's generally looking out at you.
20. What would you say to someone who wants to learn to write poetry well?
Learn language well. Poetry is about such small things in such perfect balance. You can't be stumbling about. If you don't know how to use commas or what a clause is yet, it's never too late to learn. But if you mess up a smooth read because you don't know how to punctuate, it may be too late to ever get that reader back again. Don't come in already making excuses for yourself -- greet the reader at the top of your game. He *will* be judging you. Count on it. And you deserve it. What else could he do?
Read a lot, probably much more than you'd like. It is hard to know what's cliche if you haven't read widely. It's also hard to know what you like or dislike if you haven't been exposed to much, or how to do it if you haven't seen anything like it done.
Get in the habit of thinking about writing when you read. In one ear and out the other is no good. When a passage has an effect on you, figure out why. Writing is a heist and the reader is the bank. How are you being set up?
Remember it's about people. Technical virtuosity, should you achieve it, can still ring hollow. Don't look for polite approval, but to make a poem stick in someone.
And try not to use the word "translucent" too often. It gets annoying.
