WEBVTT

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I was just thinking about
a situation where you're

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in a home, and the reason you're
having such difficulty with it,

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that you aren't stuck
quite where it's all wrong.

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And then you realize
where the fork is,

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and sometimes it's
just so accidentally.

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You could be looking at
a book of fairy tales

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in the bookstore for a second.

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You just say, oh, this
is where I'm at, where

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I should be going with it.

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Yeah.

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And then the whole
thing gets scrapped.

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And it may be 26 lines.

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And it may come down to 11.

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Right, it might be finding
a kind of insertion point

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where the poem is
meant to begin.

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And Chekhov says
it's about stories.

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His advice to
short story writers

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is get rid of the beginning,
get rid of the ending.

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The beginning is all throat
clearing and introductory scene

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setting, and the ending is
like some false conclusion.

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The story's in the middle.

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That's the realities
of the middle.

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So Checkov just abandons
his characters at the end.

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He just leaves them
in hotel rooms,

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and he doesn't stick around
solve their problems.

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He just leaves them stuck
with these problems.

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He's off writing another story.

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Do you compose on the
computer or is there a--

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Oh, no.

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Never on the computer.

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To me it's always like in
a notebook or its written,

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and I write it a number of
times and then get a fair copy.

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And then I try to wait
as long as possible

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before putting anything
up on a screen.

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On the screen that
looks frozen to me,

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and I can't get in there.

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Plus if you're
revising on a screen

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I suppose there are
technically ways

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of retaining your
corrections, but there's

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nothing like a page
full of scribbles to let

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you know what you've done.

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I mean, you can see
you cross this out,

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or you maybe you put
this word over here.

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Maybe I'll use it later.

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That whole mess that you
make on the page, for me,

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is that's kind of the workplace.

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And the screen it seems
like it's almost printed.

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It's in there.

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You don't have any
control over it,

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so I wait as long as possible.

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When I put it up on the
screen what I'm basically

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thinking about a lineation
at that point because then

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you can see how
long the lines are.

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That's another thing I'm
thinking about all the time is

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making good lines.

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Poets are, we're line
making creatures.

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Poetry is expressed in lines.

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It's taken in by lines.

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And we are like homo
linearium or something.

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We are line making creatures.

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And if we go out to
the end of the page

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we're going to be writing prose.

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We don't want that to happen.

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So we become kind of
prose avoidance systems

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in this reflexive habit of
turning back all the time.

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Miller Williams
says that the line

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should be three things:
a unit of sense, a unit

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rhythm, and a unit of syntax.

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Now of all your lines
fulfilled those three criteria,

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you'd be a really good poet.

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Every line has a cadence
to it, it has a sense to it

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and has a kind of
syntactical integrity.

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