From the April 2001 Knopf Question-a-Poet Contest
1. Do you rely on inspiration to get you started on a poem, or do you have
other ways to get going, and if so, what are those starting techniques? --Barbara Blossom Ashmun
"The inner clock of plants testifies to a deeper, measured tempo that
counteracts our manufactured rush."
Garden Retreats: Creating an Outdoor Sanctuary
Franz Wright replies:
I want to say that I love this quotation about the life of plants, and it
does remind me of something I have been trying to get through my own head
since I first seriously began trying to write poems at the age of fifteen,
namely, that the--for lack of a better term--creative process has its own
cycles and seasons and is not necessarily responsive to my will, not most of
the time. I do experience, occasionally, what might be called rapturous
states during which I almost have the impression that poems are being
dictated to me and I have only to write them down, but most of the time I
feel miserably incompetent and ignorant in the face of writing just about
anything (including this rambling response). Honestly, I rely most heavily
on my own willingness to keep slowly trying to write--and I do try every
day--even though the results might often be interpreted as proof that I'm in
the wrong business. Because my experience has been that this willingness to
go on very slowly collecting and amassing these poor fragmentary efforts is
sometimes rewarded over time: specifically, by providing me with a store of
material I can draw on during those brief, extremely rare and completely
unpredictable periods of inspiration.
2. Each time I read your poetry I feel deep emotions that don't dissipate with
repeated readings. I wonder, is it the same for you? How do you, the poet
of such powerful pieces such as "Primogeniture," "November 14," "Thanks
Prayer at the Cove," and "Written With a Baseball-Bat Sized Pencil,"
confront your own poetry? Does the emotion stay as raw and fresh for you
with each reading? Or is this a phenomenon unique to the reader, you might
say 'nur mir allein?' --Joan Gold
PS:
I am a reading teacher in a public elementary school. You might be
interested to know that your poem, "Primogeniture," was read to the 5th
grade language arts class by their writing teacher. It was very well
received. Hopefully this experience will impact their lives and those of
their own children.
Thank you for this thoughtful question--and it is awfully touching to know
that a particular poem of mine reached some children in the fifth grade.
(Incidentally, my mother-in-law is a reading teacher, so I found this
especially interesting.)
I have to say in response that I very rarely reread or even think about the
poems I have managed to finish, except when I am trying to put together
something for a public reading--and what I experience when confronting a
handful of poems I still feel I can genuinely take some pride in, is
primarily disbelief and gratitude. While actually working on a poem, one
that does arrive at this finished state (something that doesn't happen all
that often) or that comes to me rapidly in a finished state (something that
double doesn't happen all that often), I usually have the sensation that
some enormous and undeserved happiness has occurred in my life, or somehow
the whole world has suddenly changed, and in emulation of Theodore Roethke I
tend to get down on my knees and say "thank you"--then I take a walk and try
to enjoy this for as long as I can, because I can't help but be aware of how
long it will be, and what I'll no doubt have to go through, before it
happens again. If it happens again.
3. How do you know when a poem is finished? --Edward L. Tury
This is a terrific question, a profound question, and one that amazes me
because it reminds me that I have never really had the faintest idea of how
to answer it. But certainly the sensation involved is a physical one, an
abrupt and indescribable sense of well-being and happiness. It doesn't
happen very often.
I would like to be more clear about this, and maybe I can be by saying that
a poem seems finished to me when it meets or in some measure corresponds to
the following criteria set down marvelously by Paul Valery in one of his
gorgeous essays on the subject:
"...language contains emotive resources mingled with its practical, directly
significant qualities. The duty, the work, the function of the poet are to
bring out and render active these forms of movement and enchantment, these
stimulants of the emotional life and intellectual sensibility, which are
mixed together in the customary language with the signs and means of
communication of ordinary superficial life. Thus the poet consecrates
himself to and consumes himself in the task of defining and constructing a
language within the language; and this operation, which is long, difficult
and delicate, which demands a diversity of mental qualities and is never
finished, tends to constitute the speech of a being purer, more powerful and
profound in his thoughts, more intense in his life, more elegant and
felicitous in his speech, than any real person."
4. I was stunned by the directness of your poem about child beating. Its directness, its terse agony, carried a sense of outrage that seemed to call into question the very act of writing poetry. I think it was Adorno who said art was impossible after Auschwitz. Do you find poetry a relevant way to address the outrages, large and small, of the distinctly human capacity for dehumanizing one another? Or is poetic reverie and practice more of a consolation for something lost? Does it awaken and mobilize? Or does it simply console? --Levi Gardner
I think it does both, if it is any good. When I'm moved by a poem I am
profoundly consoled--that is, I feel evidence of a higher, more intelligent
and affectionate definition of the terms "reality" or "human condition"--and
at the same time am filled with a renewed determination to lead a more
considerate and intelligent life. This occurs quite spontaneously and so,
in my experience, closely resembles the sensation of love.
When I read a poem which very much moves me, or am fortunate enough to write
what I feel is a successful poem, I'm reminded of another of the staggering
perceptions of the great French poet and essayist Paul Valery, and as I do
not have the text available I am going to try to paraphrase it from
memory--:
"To what could this passion of the intellect [poetry] correspond, affecting
so deeply the life of the person who has it, sometimes taking away his
ability and, so to speak, his right to sleep, if it were not to some
sovereign good which he perhaps feels existing in himself, and which a
little more constancy, tension, and keen hope can, at any moment, allow him
to grasp?"
5. Do you sometimes pare an existing poem down, until you have the "bare" essentials? In some of your sparer poems there is beauty and a sense of "aha," despite a lack of descriptive features. Are you working like a sculptor, who discovers what is in the stone, or in your case the poem?
I think ideally I would like, in a poem, to operate by way of suggestion, to
say only enough to enable the perceptive and wide-awake reader to have his
or her own experience or interpretation of some things I might have felt,
noticed, thought about--and a renewed sense of awe at his or her own
comparable experiences. In some way any good piece of writing is a mirror,
don't you think. Or maybe a window, as George Orwell said, which is not
supposed to draw too much attention to itself but provide the sight of
something else. In any event, I like your analogy of the sculptor. Although
I must say when things are going well in the composition of a poem, I have
more the sense of being the stone that's being worked on.
6. Do you see yourself as more a poet of hope or a poet of despair?
I take this question very seriously and hope my response is not going to
come across as glib. Of course I would like to believe myself a person of
hope, and yet it seems to me that hope and despair are two of the illusory
polarities (which include life and death). One cannot exist without the
other, for one thing--and for another, and speaking here strictly for
myself, the spiritual condition of hope derives from the obvious
hopelessness of every mortal's physical condition, the death sentence we are
all living under. In other words, though strictly sensory evidence provides
us with a condition in which there is no hope we are free to choose anyway,
splendidly, to behave hopefully, to create and love as opposed to hating and
destroying. We are free, in some strange way, because of our hopelessness.
And I mean free as spiritual beings, and not in the sinister or anarchic
sense that anything is permitted.
7. The dominant chord I hear throughout your poems is a liberation from
fear. From fear of loss, from fear of death, from fear of forgetting. How
do you tap into such a state of liberation? --Joshua W. Polacheck
I hope I can summon the clarity and simplicity of mind to respond in some
meaningful way to this marvelous question. I've enjoyed all the questions
that have come, but have to say this one is particularly important to me as
it involves fear, the emotion or mental condition which so dominated my
life, until quite recently, from the time that I was eight years old, that I had
long come to consider it my normal state.
I did in fact have an experience, in September 1999, which apparently
changed all that--I don't think it is possible for me to describe, so let me
just say that toward what proved to be the end of a serious two year long
illness during which I felt and was offered almost no hope of recovery, I
quite suddenly had an experience which convinced me that unqualified love
and forgiveness are perpetually present and freely available to everyone
(and I mean everyone), and that pretty much everything I do, and everything
that happens to me, are the result of my failure to keep this fact
consciously, radiantly in mind.
So I attempted to take certain steps toward ways to do just that. To be
specific, I completely quit drinking (a miraculous occurance for me as,
quite frankly, a textbook alcoholic of the most dangerous and
self-destructive kind, as well as someone who has suffered from an
especially devastating form of mental illness); I did some things I have
longed to do all my life but was prevented from doing by my isolation from
and fear of other people and life itself, such as being formally initiated
into the Catholic church, working as a consultant at a mental health clinic
and as a volunteer facilitator at a marvelous center for children grieving
the death of a parent; and I was able in a period of months to finish The
Beforelife. And little by little I have gotten better and made some
progress. Certainly the fear, that all-encompassing and seemingly
originless dread (which can take many forms, including the three you
mention) has left me. And I am grateful that you are able to find some proof
of that in my work. I am working on a new collection which contains a number
of poems which address this experience much more directly and literally.
I want to say finally that I believe life is (as the Buddha, the Awakened
One, pointed out) suffering, mostly, from beginning to end. We cannot know
why that is, but there is a jubilant liberty in experiencing the reality of
Kierkegaard's observation that suffering is the characteristic of God's
love. In refusing to give up, until one reaches a point where one assents
to the simultaneous terribleness and glory of being here at all. It is a
privilege to suffer, the alternative is not getting to be here.
