How does a poem begin?
Rarely with a specific line or bit of language, as seems to be the case for others. More often, it’s more of a physiological sense that if I try to write, I’ll end up with something worth keeping—there’s a charge there, and I can feel it. I can only rare say where the charge comes from, but once it’s there, I can sit down to write and know with some certainty that I’ll end up with something “good,” by my lights, even if (as is most often the case), I won’t have any idea of what that something will look like.
But I actually think this is a bad way to work for anyone with meaningful time constraints. Waiting around for inspiration works well when you have a lot of free time, but not if you don’t. Luckily, there’s no need to wait. I think feeling “the charge” is a positive indicator, but its absence isn’t a negative indicator; I’ve had plenty of experiences where forcing myself to write has actually turned out very well. I think often about something John Ashbery says in his Paris Review interview: “…on the whole I feel that poetry is going on all the time inside, an underground stream. One can let down one’s bucket and bring the poem back up.” I think this is basically right, at least for me. Sometimes the water is near the surface, and you barely need to lower the bucket at all—whatever you try turns out to be the right thing, or close to it. But other times the water is lower, and it takes a while for the bucket to reach it, and maybe, in a given sitting, it doesn’t touch the water at all. But the water is always there. The trick is that you have to actually go to the well to draw from it, and many of us (me included) could do a better job of that.
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