How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?
A line will come to me unbidden. Like Spicer with his Martian radio. Maybe I’ll hear something someone says in a crowd, or on the literal radio when I am driving, and it sparks a poem about swans and a Sibelius symphony. Something nags from the inside or outside. I consider that a first entrance into the world, like WCW in the poem about spring where the scrappy little pieces of vegetation begin to emerge. I carry a writing book if I am away from my laptop. I’ll scratch down in the book whatever I can grab. Lines/words/phrases come and go fast. Sometimes, like a few days back, this will turn into an extended improv writing session. This one was maybe twenty minutes. I sat on the grass of a low hillock beside a street and let the writing go wherever within the parameters of two characters I am developing for a novel. It was surprising and satisfying. I get home. I type it into the MS, working on it as I do. I think I have a whole scene. I’ll get back to it in a couple of days.
I don’t belong to any writer groups. I tried a couple but didn’t find them helpful. So many participants in these groups seem limited to the subjective, confessional voice, as if the only poets they ever read are Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell. I have two superb editors who are friends, Rod Bradley and Bob Hogg. Poets themselves, they talk fluently about rhythm, line breaks, enjambment, sounds, the mechanics, and so forth. Bob misses nothing. Not a syllable. Rod once told me to swap the places of the penultimate and ultimate stanzas of a poem about Leonard Cohen. I couldn’t believe he was telling me this. I almost felt insulted. But I did. He was 100% dead on about the change.
I rely on those two guys. I’m so lucky to have them. Their insight and generosity never fails.
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