How important is nature in your life and in your writing?
It's funny, I don't think of nature as being something
that one goes into separate from one's own life,
if that makes sense.
Someone asked today about the birds in my poems,
and I've been thinking a lot about why
are their birds in so many of my poems.
And I'm hoping it's not because it's a poetic cliché.
I think it's because it's the wilderness that we
see every day.
That's really the only wild animal
that, no matter where you live, you see them.
It's incredibly important.
I mean, if I'm stuck, that's where I'll take a walk, or sit.
I have sort of an office where it's just all windows,
and I can get an idea just looking at a tree,
or watching the way the wind's moving,
or listening to something.
Taking a long drive and sort of watching landscape
kind of scroll by, like film.
So it's really important.
I think that's where most of my sense of metaphor comes from,
is seeing things in the natural world and reflecting
that back to something in the made world, or vice versa.
Yeah, I can't imagine writing poems in a cubicle,
in other words.
I really need a window to write a poem.
Thank you for your nice--
very nice poems.
I'm curious to know how old your children are now,
and if you still find them inspiring?
Well, they have their moments.
They are now six, and my daughter
will be 10 in about two weeks.
So kindergarten, fourth grade.
Yes, they're still really inspiring.
My oldest is getting to the age now
where I'm probably going to have to start running things by her
if I want to use them in poems.
And my son is at an age now where
he wants to know why everything he says isn't in poems.
He said something two years ago, and he still
asks why it's not in a poem yet.
We were walking after dropping his sister off at school,
and he was still home with me.
He was four.
And we saw a squirrel jump from a tree to a power line
to a roof, doing that sort of network thing
that squirrels do, and he said, it's
like a secret sidewalk in the sky.
And I said, oh buddy, that's a simile.
And you actually used like, alliteration, and that's great.
And he looked at me and he said, is that a poem?
And I said, well, it's not a poem,
but it could turn into a poem.
It's a great idea.
And I swear to you, two years later, he's still like,
have you written that squirrel poem?
It's like, dance, monkey.
Right, you know?
So right now, they're pleased to see themselves in the poems.
I think it makes them feel like their ideas are
important and have value, and I love that.
I mean, even when my son was three,
he carried a writer's notebook to preschool in his backpack.
And he couldn't write, but he sees me do it.
And when his preschool teacher asked him
why he had a Moleskine, he said, well, you never
know when you might get an idea, and you need to write it down
before you forget.
Age three.
So I feel like the indoctrination is happening.
But I do realize, too, that at a certain point,
their stories and ideas will be their own, and not my--
not kindling for my fire.
So I'm hoping to be sensitive about that
as they get older and want to write their own poems
or stories.
OK.
I'm so excited.
Thank you very much for your reading.
And your poems are beautiful.
Thank you.
Really beautiful, they touch me very much.
I'm curious to know, when is your favorite time to write?
And, with two young children, how you manage it?
My favorite time to write is whenever
they will leave me alone.
Really, early morning and late night are my best times.
And I think that might have something
to do with that sort of fuzzy space
that's sort of like you're coming out of sleep
and out of dreaming, and your mind, like the edges,
are still a little soft.
So, early morning is good for me.
And then late night, because you're
sort of going toward those sort of soft spaces.
But once I hit like, a hard line,
and I've had a couple of cups of coffee and I'm awake,
then I'm doing work for clients, typically.
I'm a freelance writer, so I try to spend my afternoons
doing work for other people.
But those sort of like, liminal times
are the times I write best.
Although, with small children, as you said,
I have learned to write whenever I can.
So sometimes it's in the car, on the back of a bank receipt.
Or, if I'm walking the dog, talking into my iPhone
and recording an idea so I don't lose it.
Or, on a road trip, scrawling, sort of not really looking
at what I'm doing on a legal pad in the passenger seat
so I don't lose something.
Or, if I get really on a wild tear, saying,
who wants to watch Moana again?
And I can buy myself 90 minutes while they watch a movie
and have popcorn.
And I'm a hero, but I'm also getting something done.
So yeah, they're still young enough
that-- my daughter is old enough that she can keep herself busy,
and she's fine just reading a book while I work.
But my little guy is still pretty--
needs me to be there doing everything,
so Moana really saves me sometimes.
Hi.
Thank you.
I was wondering, we have this debate in my poetry workshop,
where sometimes there are poems that come to you,
and they feel like gifts.
It's like, you write them down, and you didn't write it.
It just wrote itself.
It never-- I mean, it hardly ever happens,
but I find that I have a lot of poems
that I've been working on for so long,
and I don't know when to just get rid of them.
I mean--
Don't get rid of them.
But I wondered-- wondered about that.
How long-- like, what do you do with those problem children?
I just have them in a folder.
I mean, I am not like you.
I don't have more good poems than bad poems.
Billy Collins says they're like every single writer has
200 bad poems in them.
And I think--
Oh, I have a lot more than that.
I have-- I know.
I mean, maybe if you're Billy Collins, you do.
Yeah.
I'm going to skew that average.
Yeah, I write a lot of bad poems.
Or rather, I write a lot of poems that start out
bad, and either they--
I put them aside and trust my future self
to better deal with them, or I put them aside
and I never come back to them.
Or I'm able to sort of salvage one important piece of that
poem.
It's sort of like this book is salvaged
from two really big things.
Well, poems are the same.
I mean, every once in a while, I may write 30 lines,
and maybe only two of them get sort of
carried forward into a thing that becomes a real poem.
Or the poem you like the best isn't the one
that everybody else likes.
That's the other weird thing, is--
Oh, that's the truth.
I think I have a really good poem, and nobody ever thinks.
I have only had one gift poem in my life.
A poem that I sat down and wrote in one sitting, and it's "Good
Bones."
Which is hilarious to me.
And I have one called "Bones."
Yeah, I mean-- and so, my feeling
is, if you write a poem in one sitting,
you should like, not trust that poem.
That's how I feel about it.
Be very suspicious of that poem.
Set that side of--
set that one aside and share it with other people,
because I don't really work like that.
I tend to work in little increments.
I'll write something down, and then that'll sit for a while,
and then I'll write something else.
And I'll think, maybe these two things can live together.
Maybe-- actually, all three of these things,
and actually maybe this draft over here that has been
languishing for two years, maybe I just created the pieces that
this thing needs to--
I never even knew what this poem wanted to be about,
and now it gets to live with these other things
and become this secret thing.
So I wouldn't ever throw anything away.
I would set it aside, because you never
know when you might be able to come back.
And that thing you thought of three years ago,
and had no idea maybe what purpose it might serve,
and it's still there.
Thank goodness for flash drives, right?
We can keep this stuff.
OK, I think we'll just close it off there.
Sure.
Save your voice.