These workshops you mentioned, many of us are told,
you know cut out the adverbs, cut out the adjectives.
And in reading a number of your poems,
I've noticed you very quietly sneak in a lot of adjectives.
How aware are when you're writing that the adjectives are
getting in there?
Right.
I'm surprised anyone noticed.
[LAUGHTER]
It's very, very astute of you.
[LAUGHTER] I'll have to sneak them in a little more sneakily.
[LAUGHTER]
Well, they I think they need--
modifiers need to be deployed very consciously.
I tried in a workshop often to get my students
to write without modifiers in the beginning.
It's very difficult to write without simile or metaphor
modifiers.
In the style sort of of William Carlos Williams,
say in his poem "Nantucket," which
is a poem of just pure nouns.
I try to--
I think there's the things of the world--
the cup, for example, has an expressive power.
And without your modifying it, without saying it's a warm,
purple, something cup-- welcoming cup--
cup is really self-sufficient.
I think Charles Simic is wonderful with that,
taking a word like broom, or a word like apple,
or store of window, or street lamp,
and letting it alone unchaperoned.
And so then, I think a easy mistake
is to crowd your nouns with modifiers so that you
can't see the noun anymore.
Chekhov talks about this in writing short stories.
Chekhov says, if I say -- if I write,
a man walked into a park and sat down on the lawn,
you can see that immediately.
It's just as if I said to you, a sliced orange on a plate.
You see what I mean?
You can't help but see it.
There's a power in just [SNAPS FINGERS]
being able to evoke that.
But Chekhov says, if I say a balding middle-aged man wearing
a shabby gray overcoat slowly shuffled through the park
gates--
and you stop seeing it anymore, because you just have language.
The language is there and the thing isn't there anymore.
Now Seamus Heaney said that when he was a young man,
he wanted to write poems like stained glass--
really impressive and flashy and colorful.
And after a while, he wanted to write poems like glass
and just to see the thing.
But I think my way of going about it, I think, is to --
is to again begin with a simple vocabulary, simple palette,
simple diction--
with a respect for the fact that the word bird, and cup,
and window, and tree can get along very well without you,
thank you very much, right?
But having established a simple vocabulary,
you then open the opportunity for this kind of stealth stuff
you're talking about, where you can then
put in a kind of outrageous adjective.
But if you just start by throwing modifiers
at the reader, it becomes a kind of confusing assault of effect.