A Quote by Maurice Sendak
I'm writing a poem right now about a nose. I've always wanted to write a poem about a nose. But it's a ludicrous subject. That's why, when I was younger, I was afraid of [writing] something that didn't make a lot of sense. But now I'm not. I have nothing to worry about. It doesn't matter.
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I'm writing a poem right now about a nose. I've always wanted to write a poem about a nose. But it's a ludicrous subject. That's why, when I was younger, I was afraid of something that didn't make a lot of sense. But now I'm not. I have nothing to worry about. It doesn't matter.
Writing has nothing to do with publishing. Nothing. People get totally confused about that. You write because you have to - you write because you can't not write. The rest is show-business. I can't state that too strongly. Just write - worry about the rest of it later, if you worry at all. What matters is what happens to you while you're writing the story, the poem, the play. The rest is show-business.
Baudelaire's L'Héautontimorouménos was long seen to be a sexual sadomasochistic poem, it is now generally accepted that the poem is about writing poetry.
I'm always writing towards a discovery. When I'm writing poems in particular, I'm often writing because a few images coalesced in my mind and I thought, "I wonder why these images are abrading against each other. I wonder what happens if put them in a poem and explore them." I'm trying to learn something every time I write a poem.
If I begin writing a poem that means I'm intrigued in some way by whatever it's about and that if I'm not trying to find something new and pushing the envelope in the poem I can't expect my reader to be particularly excited about it either.
I loathe the trivialization of poetry that happens in creative writing classes. Teachers set exercises to stimulate subject matter: Write a poem about an imaginary landscape with real people in it. Write about a place your parents lived in before you were born. We have enough terrible poetry around without encouraging more of it.
As a rule, I am very skeptical of tying books to anniversaries. I don't think readers care. I also feel that it just about guarantees that somebody else will be writing a book on the same subject, but being a former journalist, I'm always interested in, like, why write about something today? Why do it now?
Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing a poem. And sometimes I get to the end of the poem and look back and go, 'Oh, that's what this is all about,' and sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven't solved anything, but at least I have a new poem out of it.
Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I'll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, 'I'd like to write about that.' Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.
So writing about love or having it infuse the poems that I'm writing has never been something I've set myself to do, except when I write a poem for my wife, for an occasion, such as our anniversary.
Sometimes with certain writing, you feel like you've got to be literal, hit it hard on the nose, just to get the point across. Good writing is more subversive I think - or good scenes. They are about one thing on the page but you can make it about something completely different.
You're looking for something, I don't know what I'm looking for, but I'm looking. Writing is a lot about that. When you write a poem. When you write a novel.
What I love about drafts is the experimental nature of them. The draft is what you know about writing a poem running up against what you don't know about the subject. If you're lucky, you get to surprise yourself.
People I know who succeed don't mind working. Those who are competent seem to like doing things well -- not stopping because they haven't accomplished what they wanted to on the first go-round. They're willing to do it twenty times, if necessary. There's an illusion that the good people can easily do something, and it's not necessarily true. They're just determined to do it right. I was impressed by hearing one of the women at Radcliffe talk about writing a poem, how many revisions a single poem sometimes has to go through -- fifty or sixty revisions to come out with a poem sixteen lines long.
There's something immediate about the experience of reading a poem - whether it's the music or some other element of it - that just seems to access another part of the brain. You know, Charles Olson talks about this transfer of energy that happens between the writer and the reader of the poem. I guess there's something essential to me about acknowledging upfront the immensity of it - the difficulty of it - and even allowing that to be the subject.
I think all writing is about writing. All writing is a way of going out and exploring the world, of examining the way we live, and therefore any words you put down on the page about life will, at some level, also be words about words. It's still amazing, though, how many poems can be read as being analogous to the act of writing a poem. "Go to hell, go into detail, go for the throat" is certainly about writing, but it's also hopefully about a way of living.
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