How do you know when a poem is finished?
Yeats says a poem should end like a well-made box, closing, but these days I know a poem is finished when I want to go live there, when it doesn't bother me anymore. Close me up in the book, in the vault. And then, like Madeline Usher, I'll spring out!
What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
Poetry is so precise … it can be read in an instant but felt for an eternity … it can continue to unfold inside someone’s heart long after it has graced their eyes … in this sense, poetry can shift opinions, it can open minds to things they were previously closed to, it can bridge gaps in communication across different cultures or classes or lived experiences … it is small enough to slip under one’s defences yet large enough to move the biggest barriers ...
When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?
I do have to pull myself up and back every now and then. I find with my constant creating I go in different directions which is good and bad. I love to experiment, but I still find solace in what I think of as a “base” style for my vispo and asemic work. I talk a little about this style in Brave New Word. When I am wanting to come back, not just with visual work, but to my soul, I look to these poets, mainly. I do love anthologies and will always turn to an anthology in a time of need. I think they are hugely underrated. We should all be reading anthologies daily.
No More Masks: An Anthology of Poems by Women, edited by Ellen Bass and Florence Howe; Levertov; Bachmann; Rich.
How important is music to your work:
You mean rhythm and sound combined? Without music, it is not poetry. It just isn’t. It is something else that could be interesting for other reasons, but music is elemental to poetry. Music is the engine; thought is not the engine. No music? You have prose maybe artfully arranged. To me it is Death. That is the truth. Poetic music was first the sound of clapping or feet stamping around a fire, maybe with some chanting or groans added in. Rhythmic utterance, incantation, dream, intuition, song, prayer. Music is the most elemental part of the art and I refuse to abandon it. There are some interesting flat sounding poems out there that do work, so what do I know? Still, how else does one really reach another place? You need transport. It is true that you have to be sure you don’t lie with your music. Be careful that it doesn’t lull you into saying a half-truth or something sentimental or fuzzy. I was preoccupied with that at Iowa, how to ensure I didn’t lie. I was obsessed—and I still am; I wanted my poems to be pure. In graduate school, I dropped all my dumb, half-understood college girl tools and began to work without any nets at all. It was a mess but necessary. (I was reminded yesterday that in high school I had wanted to be a hybrid of Thomas Wyatt and Joni Mitchell!) I’m finally seeing how that ugly period led to the poems I am writing now, the poems I wanted to write 25 years ago. Things take a long time to settle in art, one’s own art, if you are really putting pressure on your work. So, please, everyone remember that art is not a race, though our culture makes it seem so.
What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?
The agonising last throes of finishing. I often 'finish' as I'm submitting to mags. So often, I'm there, already after numerous versions and edits, maybe after workshopping or showing friends, and then, as the deadline nears, and you're forced to really get into the minutia, suddenly the whole damn poem is populated with issues and you have to keep going over and over it. This can go on for days after you thought you were ready to submit. It feels like a kind of madness at that point. The easy, fun part is coming up with the idea and getting started. The creative rush is what I'm in it for, really. Then the work begins and I don't like work, it's just got to be done. Sometimes you don't manage to nail it for the submission. The poem gets rejected and you look at it again and say oh no, I can see now what's wrong and it's easy to fix. Some poems come together and get published with no sweat at all, but others ... I had a poem accepted for British mag, The Rialto, recently, which I'd been working on for about three years!
How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?
I haven’t shared poems with friends or writers groups in years. I like to have the intimacy of this work all to myself for as long as possible prior to publication. It’s such a private geography. It also takes time and patience for me to let the poem’s voice really fill the language, however uneasy that feels, however intensely that happens in the work. I have to do it alone, aware that I’m not alone because there are other poets, other readers, living and dead, who are in that poem with me. Mostly, I’m reluctant to ask for a second set of eyes and when I finally do it is likely it will be an editor or my agent who is looking at the work. Many poet-friends in my life are generous and willing to read my work before I publish my poems but I’m aware that they are also trying to balance obligations that factor into the daily living and writing of their own work, day-jobs, teaching, time their families, and their overall health. I would rather they give that extra time and energy to themselves, as it is so needed by all of us, especially during this pandemic. It’s a gift, and I don’t take it for granted, that they will be there for me and vice versa, but I tend to save this sort of request for something that’s very special or where I’m feeling more vulnerable than I usually do.
How do you know when a poem is finished?
Everything is unfinished. It always is. I remember being outraged when learning that W.H. Auden said, or what somebody called Mallarmé said, a poem is never finished, it is only abandoned. I took that to be an excuse for something worse than slovenliness. I've since come to agree with what he was saying.
In the practice of writing, or in at least one theory of language, you never can 'finish' a poem, if by 'finish' we mean fixed in place, once and for all, as if it had found an ultimate achievement beyond which you cannot possibly go. But you can never be done with the words and the shapes. I've come to think of the poem as something that is open and unrealized, immune to completion and resistant to perfection. I believe in trying to polish them, making them shine, but they're never finished, as in done and totally sufficient. I never feel that what I have written cannot be improved, or altered into another no-less accomplished version. It could always take a small or even large swerve in another direction. The sense of the poem as a done deed doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
So when are you “done”? The limits often are practical. You get tired; you haven’t the energies to take it further. You haven’t time: the editor wants, the publisher insists; you yourself have to get on with the quotidian pressures of your life; you have run out of ideas, words, impetus, inspiration, models; you have other things to write; nobody in her right mind (or a mind to her bank account) is going to publish your 2,000 page poem; you lose oomph, purpose: the damn thing wears down your hopes and spirits; you are depleted mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically; you are discouraged, defeated, can do no more; you are elated with what you have done, or at least pleased, you want to find a reader you have an idea what sorts of editors may wait lovingly or unlovingly on the other side of the door, readers too; what it is they will bless or curse?
You aren’t writing to god. You are a suffering, flawed mortal with your own dreams and limitations; you work in the sublunary world. You have to let it go at some point. You may have to learn to let it go.
These words at the end of my book Country Music:
I've done my best
no no there's no need for thanks
it is the least
i could do
it's not as if i thought
it was done
or anything
that there could be no more
not in the least
what can i say
that's the way things go
whether or not they are finished
