We have all come up with questions to ask you and hope they don't trouble you in any way!
JV: Here's my revised question:
In "And How to End it," Voyager I and II have a unique presentation and a very original format. Do you have a special place that you go to write something like Voyager? Do you have a specific ritual that eases you into writing?
SO:
I am most interested in the section Elegy and Fugue on Voyagers 1 & 2 and how you correlate history and lying. One of the poems that I really enjoy is
I have heard that history is like an onion:
it will sprout up anywhere you let it.
Did you use Voyagers 1 & 2 not only as a time frame for a certain period in history but also as a perspective, since there are so many ways to look at the past and what we know as history is merely what was thought important enough by some people to be recorded?
Furthering that question, what is your perspective on history,how much of what we are taught or what we know of "history" do you believe is a lie, partial or whole and how did this influence this section of the book?
I hope these questions aren't too confusing and thank you.
S.B.: In your book and your poetry, you ask many questions. I wonder if you have found any answers to these questions, or if you even look and just ask them to inspire thought. Also, I wonder if you really want to know the answers to such questions.
MS: my question is:
I loved how you were able to weave many different poems together. For instance, in Fog, every page seemed to represent a different poem, yet they were all strung together to create one stream of consciousness. When writing these poems, were they revised to fit together or were they written intentionally like this?
my other question is:
I know as a poetry writer, I am never fully convinced that my poetry is speaking in the volume I'd like it to. How long does it take you to revise your poetry so that it truly becomes what you want it to be? Were you satisfied with each poem in your book, believing that every poem gets your voice/message across?
AB:
DM: When writing a poem, how do you know your poem is finished? I noticed that we tend to rewrite poems over and over to see if we actually found the ending to our poem, so how do you know when you finally composed "the poem?"
I also wanted to know when you write a poem, do you get the message you want to convey in your poetry, or do you use certain hidden messages that you want the readers to try to analyze and figure out on their own?
Thanks again for taking the time to read our questions!!!!
Team 2 :-)
John,
ReplyDeleteI do not have an particular ritual that I follow other than that I compose at the computer. I like the speed (I type much faster than I can write), the immediate ability to see how the words look on the page, and the ability to moves chunks of text around. The Voyagers piece was composed using quite a bit of research, so I was moving around from the NASA web site and probably refering to some books; being at the computer makes that all easier. The downside is that I don't usually save drafts; but I usually have pretty good recollection of what I've done and what I've changed, so I don't miss having a hard copy record of my revisions. I would recommend saving drafts if you're working on a computer though. As far as "easing into writing," I don't have that luxury. I have two kids, teaching, guitar lessons, occasionall exercise, and a journal, a press, and an MFA program to run. When I get an idea or want to respond to something, I get to a computer and hit the ground running.
Thank you, Sophie,
I like that part of the Voyager piece, too. As a whole, the Voyager piece came into being partially as my response to learning several years back, as the first section of the poem explains, how far away those vessels are from us; it seems a miracle to me that we’re still communicating, especially when there’s so little communication of value going on here on Earth—political communication, I mean. I started working on this poem not long after 9/11, which for some of you may seem like an event that happened long ago in your childhood, but seems like yesterday to me. My son was born 6 days before 9/11, and I remember lying in bed with him and my wife and turning on the TV shortly after the first crash. So my children’s future (only peripherally), our amazing technological ability, our inability to reach understanding among cultures and religions, and this horrible event all came together for me in the composition of that piece. As far as I’m concerned, history is the record of our collective failure to reach global peace. It’s left to us all to tease out the lies, and that’s partially what I’m trying to get at here.
Sean,
Good question about questions. If you continue to take creative writing courses, you will, sooner or later, hear the phrase “Write what you know.” It has become a truism. The idea is that you’re better able to write about something with which you’re familiar. For me, exactly the opposite is true. I’m bored with what I already know. I want to know what I don’t know, and my writing tends to be a record of the process of finding out what I don’t’ know, or, perhaps more accurately, finding out what I can find out—because the finding out is a pleasure, too. But asking questions is a part of the process of finding out. There’s nothing wrong with admitting that we don’t know something, right? There’s nothing wrong with either doubt or curiosity. I’ve tried to capitalize on those, because they are the sources of my engagement, of my interest, of my imagination. On the other hand, as I mentioned in one of my other responses, I’m starting to become more attracted to writing about the places where I grew up. BUT—my interest is not in representing “my story,” as it were, but in recovering people, places, truths that I have lost in the interim—things I was too stupid to remember or pay attention to when I was in the moment. So, again, what I don’t know, or what I once knew and forgot.
Hi Megan,
Thanks! “Fog” was written in bits and pieces that I later rearranged into an order that I thought worked well. Some of the bits and pieces were phrases I had jotted down, some may have been collected from overheard conversation, some were composed at the computer. I’m sure I tweaked some of them here and there for better flow. But you beg an interesting question: why do all of these bits and pieces belong together? One answer is “Because I put them there,” though that might be a bit conceited. But essentially, the answer is, “Because I put them there.” I say that not because there’s any genius behind my compositional skills but because something in the language suggested to me that there was a kind of attraction among all of these bits and pieces, like iron filings drawn to a magnet. What’s the magnet? The idea of “fog”—a general haziness that pervades both individual and collective memory. With a piece like this, I put it out there and hope someone gets something out of it. If they don’t, that’s fine. As Frank O’Hara said, “Not everyone likes the movies.” Regarding your other question—sometimes a revise almost none at all, sometimes over months. I’ve even gone back to poems after years. It varies. When to stop is determined not by some measure that the poem has to live up to, but by my relationship to the poem. Either I fell like the poem is ready to go, or I don’t. There’s nothing that I expect the poem to accomplish, either in voice or meaning, before it’s “finished.” When is a conversation “finished?”
Anthony,
Good observation. I’m afraid the answer is fairly long and involved. The numbered poems in this book are unusual in that they are composed entirely of language from elsewhere in the book. You may have noticed that the numbers for the sections proceed by the Fibonacci sequence. So the 0 section starts with 0 language. The 1 section has one sentence from elsewhere in the book. The second 1 section has another sentence from elsewhere in the book. The two section is composed of two sentences from elsewhere in the book. The three section… and so on. These collected sentences aren’t simple re-presented; the words are reorganized to make new sentences. So what happens is that these numbered poems, since they are composed of language from the rest of the book, end up being a kind of fractal mirror of the rest of the book. When you look at some natural formations—coastlines or ice crystals, for example, certain patterns tend to emerge when you look at the micro level. These numbered poems are like looking at the book through a microscope. I used the Fibonacci sequence, because it is a pattern that tends to show up again and again in fractal patters. Then the question arises: why bother with all of that? First, because it was fun. Second, because this book was originally about twice as long and didn’t have the numbered poems. My publisher convinced me to break the book into two books, but I wasn’t happy with what was left—I thought it was too short, too spare. I wanted to do something to give the book its own character, and I wanted it to be in keeping with the themes and nature of the rest of the book. So I came up with the Fibonacci sequence idea, and I think it provided the book with an interesting kind of skeleton. So, yes, I did let the poems “take me,” in that I set up a process for producing the poems and stuck to the process, which is a way of writing that is very appealing to me. Artificial processes, games, “machines,” operations (sometimes chance), and collaborations are very appealing to me because they get the composition of the poems out of the realm of navel-gazing, not to mention the fact that they absolve me of the responsibility of drawing content, meaning, form, etc. out of the void.
Daisy,
See note above about revising and finishing. As I said, I’m more interested in the ongoing conversation (among my own poems and between my poems and the poems, criticism, and though of others) and in seeing what I can learn than I am in producing monolithic artifacts that stand there and look down their noses at the hustle and bustle. That said, there were certainly years early on where it was very important for me to go through the process of revising over and over. That’s part of the poet’s training, just as a musician or a dancer or an athlete have to go through many repetitive exercises in order to prepare their muscles and brains to perform at a high level later on. A poem may never get there, but the trying to get it there is what really matters. Another cliché, but I think this one’s valuable—the process is more important than the product. Regarding your question about hidden messages: No, I do not try to embed hidden messages, and I don’t know any professional poet who does. Which is not to say that there aren’t allusions or references that some readers will get and some won’t. But the poet’s job is just to write the poems, and when the poems start trying to explain themselves, the poet has a problem. Rich poems will always provide new experiences on repeated readings. I think of Alice Fulton’s poetry, for example.
I hope I’ve answered your questions well, and I look forward to talking to all of you on campus.