He asked if you have any ideas or imagery that we wanted
to turn into poetry, but we just couldn't find the words for it?
I mean that's the struggle, I mean
that's the daily struggle as a writer.
Everything that I do, that's kind of how it starts.
You mean, I see the poems in the book
and I still remember first writing the first drafts
thinking, ah, this is what I want to do.
And the final poem never achieves that vision, you know.
That's I mean, that's a struggle.
And that's a positive because it makes
you keep struggling to maybe one day I'll get it right.
Maybe one day I'll get the right words,
the right order like that.
Yeah.
And for me, one of the hardest things to write about
was my brother.
And because I was so close to it.
And every time I sat down and I thought
I'm going to write a poem about my brother,
I'm going to write a poem about what happened or how I feel,
I could never write that poem.
So what I finally did was I quit focusing on that thing
I had to tell and I looked at an image
or I looked at a time of night or I looked at a phrase
my mother had said to me about my brother.
And the very first poem I ever wrote about my brother
is the title poem of my book, When My Brother was An Aztec.
And I was reading--
I quit thinking about that.
I was reading about an Aztec story
that a friend had given me.
And that's, I just somehow made that connection.
So, I think it's OK that you sit down
to write about something in particular nothing comes out.
Because any poem that happens I think
happens and it surprises you.
So often the thing you set out to write
is not going to be the real poem, you know.
And you'll find your way back to those things.
So, I mean I think it already sounds
like you're a poet because you said,
how do you write about these things?
Because that's, I think, how every poem starts.
You don't know how you're going to do it.
Yeah, yeah.
Often the image the phrase and memory
that triggers the impulse, the desire to write something down,
it's just the first step.
It'll lead you somewhere.
And hopefully somewhere the process,
you'll make a discovery, a surprise.
And that's where the poem wants to be, where it should be.
You're thinking you want to write
a poem about your father crossing the desert,
so you're writing that poem.
You start writing that poem.
But then really the poem that wants to exist in the world
is not really about your father crossing the desert,
it's about the saguaro losing a branch in a monsoon storm.
So you never know.
But you have to start investigating, drafting,
thinking about language, dwelling with language
and just go for it.
And see where you wind up.