Jane?
I'm just wondering why you wrote in the poem
that you presented today--
yesterday morning, rather than this morning, or why
did you write that as if it were tomorrow?
I wanted to--
I think I just wanted to--
I mean, I don't know if I thought about it much.
But I wanted to be looking back on it.
I want to-- I think that just increased the elegiac sense
of having left Arizona.
I mean, maybe I'm just so anxious about making
this plane--
[LAUGHTER]
--that I put myself into line somewhere else tomorrow.
I think it was just that the backward look would add
to the elegiac tone of that.
And it's a curiosity I've always had,
like why you don't see just dead birds all over the streets
all the time.
Where do they die?
I don't know.
And don't tell me.
But if you know.
[LAUGHTER]
But I mean, there are millions of them.
And you would think that just flying through the air,
that they'd croak, and they'd fall
on your car, fall on the gas station,
or you'd find a couple on the roof occasionally.
You never see them.
It's like the elephants going off to die somewhere.
You don't have to go to an animal exotic as the elephants.
Anyway, so that was venting a little curiosity.
And it's true in my Arizona highways poem,
it's an appreciation for your state kind of also.
Yes.
When you mention that if a poem doesn't work,
you throw it away.
Yeah.
Other people I've heard say, you have to be disciplined.
I think it was Emily Dickinson, supposedly,
who rewrote and rewrote and tried to perfect each poem.
Do you think that's a discipline in itself
to say, this isn't working, I better just forget it.
It's really I think it's very idiosyncratic.
I mean, I think I just find for myself
the more I'm kind of laboring and revising,
the more it's not working, and it just begins to shut down.
I throw it away.
I think there's kind of a fall-- of course I'm revising later.
I mean I'm tinkering and looking for the word.
So it's all right to put it aside for a while
and come back.
Oh, of course.
Yeah.
It's just that I think the distinction between writing
and revision is somewhat false anyway
to begin with-- like dancer and the dance.
I mean, when I'm writing, I'm revising.
Otherwise it would be a rather mindless activity.
And when I'm revising, I'm writing aren't I?
So I just-- the way I work is just, I try to work quickly.
And I try to abandon proj --
I try not to waste time with poems
that I'm pretty sure are not going to go anywhere.
There's no flow, and it's not going [INAUDIBLE]
If there's no flow or feel like it's not going anywhere,
it's like I bail out.
Frost says, a poem cannot be fretted into being.
[LAUGHTER]
And when I feel like I'm fretting it into being,
I abandon it.
But that's interesting.
Because when I read some of your poems, I thought about Frost.
And that's what I first connected to them.
I like your idea of the conversation.
Uh-huh.
Because I think that it's almost like meeting somebody.
And you have a very simple conversation,
and then you know them better you can have a deeper,
more meaningful conversation.
That's good.
And you certainly feel that intimacy and personal address
in Frost.
I mean, I know there are people who say they revise their poem.
I mean, Mary Oliver, whose poetry I like quite a bit,
says that she writes 30, 40, 50 drafts of a poem.
I just wouldn't admit it if I did that.
[LAUGHTER]
Maybe I am doing that, just not telling you.
I just wouldn't want to say, this is the 50th draft.
What do you think?
Gonna put someone in a real spot there.
[LAUGHTER]
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
I like number one better.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah, right.
First thought, best thought.
I like Henry Taylor says--
I'm with him.
He says, if at first-- his motto is-- "if at first you
don't succeed, hide all evidence that you ever tried".
[LAUGHTER]