I was just thinking about a situation where you're
in a home, and the reason you're having such difficulty with it,
that you aren't stuck quite where it's all wrong.
And then you realize where the fork is,
and sometimes it's just so accidentally.
You could be looking at a book of fairy tales
in the bookstore for a second.
You just say, oh, this is where I'm at, where
I should be going with it.
Yeah.
And then the whole thing gets scrapped.
And it may be 26 lines.
And it may come down to 11.
Right, it might be finding a kind of insertion point
where the poem is meant to begin.
And Chekhov says it's about stories.
His advice to short story writers
is get rid of the beginning, get rid of the ending.
The beginning is all throat clearing and introductory scene
setting, and the ending is like some false conclusion.
The story's in the middle.
That's the realities of the middle.
So Checkov just abandons his characters at the end.
He just leaves them in hotel rooms,
and he doesn't stick around solve their problems.
He just leaves them stuck with these problems.
He's off writing another story.
Do you compose on the computer or is there a--
Oh, no.
Never on the computer.
To me it's always like in a notebook or its written,
and I write it a number of times and then get a fair copy.
And then I try to wait as long as possible
before putting anything up on a screen.
On the screen that looks frozen to me,
and I can't get in there.
Plus if you're revising on a screen
I suppose there are technically ways
of retaining your corrections, but there's
nothing like a page full of scribbles to let
you know what you've done.
I mean, you can see you cross this out,
or you maybe you put this word over here.
Maybe I'll use it later.
That whole mess that you make on the page, for me,
is that's kind of the workplace.
And the screen it seems like it's almost printed.
It's in there.
You don't have any control over it,
so I wait as long as possible.
When I put it up on the screen what I'm basically
thinking about a lineation at that point because then
you can see how long the lines are.
That's another thing I'm thinking about all the time is
making good lines.
Poets are, we're line making creatures.
Poetry is expressed in lines.
It's taken in by lines.
And we are like homo linearium or something.
We are line making creatures.
And if we go out to the end of the page
we're going to be writing prose.
We don't want that to happen.
So we become kind of prose avoidance systems
in this reflexive habit of turning back all the time.
Miller Williams says that the line
should be three things: a unit of sense, a unit
rhythm, and a unit of syntax.
Now of all your lines fulfilled those three criteria,
you'd be a really good poet.
Every line has a cadence to it, it has a sense to it
and has a kind of syntactical integrity.