Well, your first drafts are too good, Annie.
If you wrote really horrible first drafts the way I do,
it's not about being fearless.
It's about being dogged, it's really about being dogged.
And I think people have a certain fluency, people
who write a lot, and people who can, again,
generate an early draft.
It has all kinds of interesting linguistic things in it,
movement of the mind, and all that.
That's a separate problem, one not known to me.
Because my early drafts are, they are just terrible.
I mean, they're cliched in language and in thought.
And if I can find within that something that I can hear,
I write more off my ear than anything else.
So if I can come up with some paradigmatic sound,
then I can keep going.
That's just dogged.
So in a way, every line is a surprise.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Because I don't know where it's going to go.
I have no hope that it will go anywhere.
Sometimes, it doesn't go anywhere.
So if it does go somewhere, it's going
to go there by sheer dint of what Auden called "words
whispering to one another."
Words juxtapose one to another in some sort
of musical relation to one another.
And then, that's going to go someplace that was not
in the forefront of your mind.
As opposed to some other poem that's
made out of a more self-conscious mind.
That has a different set of problems, I think.
Because then, how do you recognize
where you're beating the palm like a horse into its stall?
Get over there, because I want you to do that.
As opposed to something else that really comes out of,
it comes out of play, I think.
Or it comes out of notion of play.
Not how high?
Isn't this great fun?
But the way music is played.
I don't know, does that--
I hope that answers your question.
I'm not quite sure what your question was, surprise.
I like it, anyway.
OK.
All right.
Yeah.
I'm interested in-- you use so much form,
and you're so interested in language and syntax.
And you managed to combine it with these very amazing ideas.
And it's a very sort of huge question,
and probably can't answer it.
But I'm interested in how you see all of these things
interacting, and how you see the form of the sonnet,
plus all of these syntactic things that you can do,
plus all of the things you're saying all at once,
and how do you see that interacting?
And how do you get it to interact?
[LAUGHS]
Well, every poem has form.
I mean, we use that pretty loosely, right?
But what we expect, I think, out of art
is that it put some shape on experience,
which has no shape, right?
So, basically, you're starting with the chaos which
is the world, and art to a greater or lesser extent,
depending very often on the aesthetic at work,
put a shape on it.
As soon as you put a frame around the painting, you say,
this does not go in.
These things go in.
This does not go in.
So, I mean, unless you were to write
one long poem for the entire rest of your life,
where everything that came along you added in,
you are making choices.
And those choices have to do with shape.
And they had to do with exclusion, inclusion
and exclusion.
That is form, that is what form is.
Because then, it will put some things
in relation to one another that might not be discernible when
it's out there in among chaos.
When we talk about fixed forms or traditional forms or any
of those things, really, all the difference between that
and so-called free verse--
I hate that term, I'd rather use the term open form--
the difference between closed form and open form
is just in the closed forms, the patterns
are brought more to the surface.
So that they're more immediately available to the reader.
So the reader will become aware of them.
Whereas in open forms, they are submerged.
I don't mean that they're not there, they are there.
So, it seems to me that if you're trying to make a poem,
you are at least intuitively going
toward some notion of form.
At different times, I found the closed forms useful.
In this particular case, when I had
written three of those little sonnets, only one was a sonnet.
But that was-- and I had written the three
things as separate poems.
And then, it seemed to me that they could all
share a similar dilemma.
And so, I wanted equal time at the podium for all the voices.
So I wanted them to have the same length and shape.
I also wanted something that could manage paradox,
because it seemed to me it was going
to be a subject matter that would bring up paradox.
And I wanted some really fierce restraint
against what I saw as possible sentimentality.
And so, that sonnet was very useful to me.
It's been around maybe hundreds of years for a reason.
And it also can signal something to a reader
as soon as the reader recognizes that that's what it is.
So if you have enough of the regularity
that the reader says, I think that might be a sonnet.
Oh, sonnet.
Don't a sonnet kind of turn in the middle?
Don't a sonnet have a history as a love poem?
All of that then, you just get to use.
It's there, it exists, and we think.
So there have been times when that's been very useful to me.
The same issues, the same principles are at work,
like if you invent your own little form, Marianne Moore,
right?
And essentially, I tried to work in the sets I was telling you
about the little short line and just for my own sake.
I like to get iambic pentameter out of my ear.
That was it for something that was
really harsh and not idiomatic.
That's very much up at the surface.
I think, you can't help but hear that.
There are lots of other things, though,
that poets do that you might not be aware of until you read
the poem about 30, 40 times just because the patterns are
kept submerged, and kept submerged
for a number of reasons.
If you're trying to emphasize their speaking
voice in a way that's idiomatic, then you're
not going to want it to seem like it was shaped
and written, made for the page.
To me, that's what the making of a poem is.
It's to try to uncover some sort of formal arrangement.
It's a speech act that's in a formal arrangement that
tries to include as much of the world
as possibly can be included without blowing it out
of the water.
But that's just the challenge over, and over, and over again.
And whatever the subject matter is,
is the occasion for trying that.
It's really negligible.
It's a horrible thing to say, don't misquote me on that.
But it is, in a way.
I mean, I don't think that poets are necessarily wise,
I don't think we have any answers.
But it seems to me that that's what the job is.
And it's in lines, so that's music, that is a rhythm.
At some point, you have to think about lines, right?
So at some point, you're going to do all those things.
And just the longer you do it, and the more you read,
and the more you think hard about all those things,
the more you tutor your intuition.
So then, when you sit down to do it,
those things will begin to raise their heads.