About My Poetry Writing Process
We've been sorting out our poetry aesthetics and the way we work, and where we get ideas in my on-line poetry class. It's interesting work, to step back and try to assess and sum up what I observe, what I sense, the way I work.
Here's what I've noticed so far.
About My Aesthetic
Poetry for me is a recording of moments, a way to make sense of what I’ve felt, experienced, and lived. Writing a poem begins with meandering—a journey through objects, moments, memories—my fingers taking dictation from my subconscious, I guess, some kind of first-draft language I hear in my head.
I love to play with words: their sounds and shapes, their look on a page, the space a poem inhabits, the musicality of letter and syllable, phrase and line. I am drawn to unexpected juxtapositions. I like what unrelated objects side-by-side can reveal; it’s a bonus when they dance and sing. I believe less is more, and seek to select and winnow in favor of the “one truer thing.” Some of the poems I write seem also to be bursting at the their English language seams!
Personally, I look to poems for insight and wisdom, to explain what it means to be deeply human, to remind me of universal connections to our shared humanity. Reading a poem remains, for me, a way to stop and find my breath.
Where I Get Ideas and What I Write About
I often come up with a single line that starts me in on the idea for a poem. Sometimes it’s something as basic as a rhythm or a sound. I try to listen and follow that around for a bit. I’m drawn to investigate congruence between something I’m experiencing now and long-ago events in my own life or in the historical record, to see what, if any, links I can make between the two. Other times I have a sketchy sense of something I want to write about and begin with that.
Writing about other people, I’m drawn to the mysterious and the thorny. The relationships that confound or sadden or disappoint me are the ones I want to further explore, to try and understand. There are certain subjects and landscapes that, I think, are beginning to recur in my work because of who I am, where I came from, what it took me to get here, and how I live now. These include the river I grew up on, the mines beneath my home valley, the flood I was in as a young girl, the tall trees that surround me now. I think, increasingly, I'm preoccupied with "threshold" moments in life—and not just the obvious ones like giving birth or someone's death but those times when you know you are living through moments that will change you and your life from here on out. There are certain losses that have stayed with me, defined me. I suspect they are the wellspring of much of my art.
As I say on my web site, I also often write about journeys and seeking, serendipity and mistake, exile and home, abandonment and connection. I write about feeling like an observer, an outsider, out-of-synch with the mainstream world. I write in search of what I know but keep forgetting. I like to ask questions even though I’m fully aware there are no answers. I often write about getting lost and finding my way. I would like to have my poems inhabit both the personal and the universal.
I've begun to think that some of my recent work has grown out of material I've been working with off and on, consciously and unconsciously, for a long, long time. It's almost as if the poems were in me, writing themselves slowly and quietly while I worked on the outside to develop the skills to get them down, the skill to better pay attention. It's now so obvious to me—from the language and images and objects and memories I've been capturing—that many of these subjects would never have found their real home in prose.
How I Work
It’s still an astonishing process to me, the way you begin not knowing where you are going, maybe with a few scribbles, notes on a memory, a word, an anything dredged from the past and, through risk and concentration, fiddling and reading out loud, trying a bit of this, tinkering with a bit of that, you find yourself onto something, or at least enough of a something that it feels OK to “put it out there” to see what other eyes and ears have to say, how it reads to them.
Most of the time, I use free-writing as a way to get into the flow of words. Beginnings have always been difficult for me. I do much better if I can start from “something” even rudimentary rather than “nothing.” Lately, I find myself going back to things I wrote earlier—notes, a story, an exercise, an essay, a journal entry—and begin from that.
I usually start with writing by hand and let myself riff on a subject or a question I might want to know more about, a moment, memory, or object I want to explore. Often from this unedited, unchecked exercise, something more I can work with will emerge. If anything is a surprise, an unexpected revelation, I pay extra attention to that. I look for what is strange, what seems uncommon to me. I then start back through, sifting the sandbox of my collected language, shaping the phrases and lines somewhere between a sculptor and a potter. That’s often when I lose myself in the “flow” of doing the work; it gets hard for me to explain my “process” beyond that.
I know I get visual, especially once I see the words here on the laptop. And I cut and paste and shift and re-arrange. And I read whatever I've got out loud and over and over—a lot. Some words seem right from the beginning. Others clunk or sound off so I fiddle and tinker, perhaps a bit obsessively. Things like should it be a or the? present or past tense? alliteration here or forsake that? is the word, sound, phrasing only appealing to me or will a reader respond to it as well? I think I am very much the beginner when it comes to understanding how best to structure a poem to evoke a response in a potential reader. I wonder if some of this has to do with audience. Who am I writing for? Myself? An ideal reader? My twin who gets all my references, is familiar with all my quirks, my tales? A particular person, someone I know or knew (now that G's dead)?
It does seem like I often get part of a poem "right" or "close to right" (whatever that means) pretty early on in the first draft. But beyond that, it also seems like it could take the rest of life, if not forever, to know if it's done. I guess that's the mystery and the madness. The thing is: I find more joy in this process than I ever did, all those years trying to write prose. And it doesn’t seem as difficult, as hard, as painful and frustrating and dragging on, forever and ever amen—in spite of all the admonitions in all the how-to poetry books about how difficult writing poetry truly is. Now, when I look back at my fiction, the better examples are the ones I tinkered with, honed and shaped on the page, line by line by line, as if they were one sinuous epic poem.
