Michael Joseph Walsh : part five

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.

Michael Joseph Walsh : part four

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

Having required a bit of renewal lately, I can answer this directly, although not exhaustively: John Ashbery, Emily Dickinson, Laura Riding Jackson, Clarice Lispector, Nathaniel Mackey, Alice Notley, Lisa Robertson, Jack Spicer, and on and on. A more exhaustive list would probably have 20 or so poets and writers on it, give or take. The test is simply whether reading a given author makes me want to write—not to write like them, exactly, but just to participate in the same activity—to be among them, in however small a way.

I think most writers have a roster like this. I otherwise read broadly, and I enjoy a great deal of what I read. But we all have our little pantheons, and I think it’s good to remind yourself that that source of renewal is there, and not to be shy about returning to it.

Michael Joseph Walsh : part three

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I very recently read (and then reviewed) Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s new book, Aerial Concave without Cloud, which (spoiler alert) is terrific. I’ve also been re-reading a lot of Lisa Robertson, and am looking forward to reading Boat, her new book, which just arrived through the mail.

Michael Joseph Walsh : part two

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Many have, but I remember in particular having a revelation after reading a lot of Wallace Stevens for the first time. It’s hard to read a lot of Stevens and not come away feeling that a lot of the time he really is just playing—I think I said something to myself along the lines of “He’s just making things up!” And that was incredibly liberating, the idea that you could just make things up, just play. This seems obvious now, but it wasn’t obvious to me when I was 20. I had this very unhelpful idea, which I think I got from misreading Eliot, that to write a really good poem you had to know beforehand what the shape of it was, and what you were aiming at—when you wrote something down, you had to already have a sense of how it fit into an architecture that you had already pre-drafted in your head. I could almost never do this (obviously), so I rarely wrote, and when I did, I found it very stressful, because in order to get anything done I had to (of course) just make things up, which felt like “cheating”—how could the poem “mean” anything, if I wasn’t sure what I was doing when I wrote the words? If anything, I’ve since moved closer to the opposite extreme; if you ask me what one of my poems “mean,” I’ll certainly have things to say, but I’ll come to those conclusions just like anyone else would—by reading the poem and thinking about it. I don’t think much at all (at least not consciously) about what my poems mean as I’m writing them, and certainly not before. Which doesn’t, I hope, prevent them from meaning a great deal (or having the capacity to generate meanings, which amounts to the same thing).

Michael Joseph Walsh : part one

Michael Joseph Walsh is a Korean American poet. He is the author of Innocence (CSU Poetry Center, 2022) and co-editor of APARTMENT Poetry. His poems, translations, and reviews have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Guernica, FOLDER, Fence, jubilat, and elsewhere. He lives in Denver.

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

I’m not sure it can accomplish anything that other forms can’t, but it certainly accomplishes some things more readily. One is density of meaning. Other forms can achieve it, but it’s hard to compete with poetry in terms of the ratio between the meaning conveyed and the number of words employed. Of course, that’s partly why poetry tends to be “hard”—it’s “hard” because it’s dense; it’s overloaded with meaning, relatively speaking. And insofar as this level of density can be achieved in other forms, it tends not to be sustained (since it’s hard to write, and takes effort to read). And we tend to describe the result, appropriately enough, as “poetic.”

The other thing that I look to poetry for, which may or may not be related to what I’ve written above about density, is its relative freedom from the injunction that writing should “make sense.” Wittgenstein once wrote that “a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.” This of course applies to all genres of literature, to varying degrees. But poetry seems to me the most liberated from the information-provision game (which isn’t to say that a poem can’t convey information, if that’s what the poet wants it to do). There are many ways to mean without at the same time making much in the way of denotative sense, and in fact, jettisoning some amount of denotative sense might be a prerequisite to our being able to clearly perceive these other kinds of meaning. I think these kinds of investigations are important, and I think poetry is the genre in which one can explore these outer dimensions of meaning most freely.