How does your work first enter the world?
In my head. As visual fragments that are unconsciously stored away. Sometimes lines enter but I think of them as poem lines which inevitably means they will be willfully destroyed. In other words, anytime I imagine that a certain phrase or sentence is “poetic”, I immediately distrust and thus destroy it. For me, the poem has to be purely organic, unconscious, received. (I know this will piss some people off, particularly those who love to give advice and whose advice all ends with “Don’t wait for the Muse! There is no Muse!” and that’s fine for them, but it is not my way of construction.) One of my poet-teachers, Herb Scott, once said that he could see me “percolating”. We were sitting in a coffeehouse and I was surrounded, literally, by dozens of poetry manuscripts that I was reading for a book contest. Herb stopped by to chat with me about my own work, and as I sat there, smelling the coffees, feeling the art above my head penetrate my scalp, watching Herb’s scratchy voice enter my eyes, thinking about Aretha Franklin and how I had lived for so many years without a deep deep deep reverence for her voice, until then, tasting the metallic blue ink slipping from my pen, Herb said, “I can see you percolating” and I erupted into laughter. My professor had just called me a pot of coffee and I thought of that image for weeks. And yes, he was right about me, as Aquarians tend to be, I was percolating, I do percolate before I entrust one line to a page.
No comments:
Post a Comment