Learning Curve

One of the greatest advantages of being the poet laureate is that I am often given the impetus I need to take time to read and think about what poetry is and what it does. I had agreed to talk this week to a group of people at the Hollin Hall Senior Center. I was given pretty free rein to talk, read, or lead a writing exercise within my hour and a half timeframe--and in my usual fashion, didn't get around to really planning things out until the days immediately leading up to the event.

The day before, I had picked up Billy Collins' new book, Ballistics, and had happened upon a great little (four lines!) poem called Divorce. This came on top of the completion of a poem-to-order for the Alex Awards, and also a reading of my son-in-law's notes on how a particular sculpture of his came to be. This confluence of circumstance led me to think about exploring the concept of creativity, and how ideas are harnessed and brought into some sort of concrete form. Indeed, this is one of the most frequently asked questions I get: how do you write something to order? where do you get ideas? what makes you choose a particular metaphor? My pre-laureate answers pretty much would have amounted to "I dunno", but I now feel like I owe people more than that.

So. How do you get ideas and convert them to poems? That's a question that is akin to asking someone how their mind works. Assuming that mine does, all I can really say is what I know about my own process. When I have a subject that I have to write about, I start to write things down: thoughts, phrases, sentences, words--anything that has any association with the topic. I may write paragraphs, I may write lists, but eventually, there will be a word or phrase or sentence that sounds right, or that appeals to me in some way. It's that something that is the seed for whatever I end up writing. Sometimes I don't find it the first time. Sometimes it just jumps up and skims across the page, playing with all sorts of other thoughts that I race to write down. That's how my "Audrey" poem went: one phrase and I was off and running. Other times (last year's Alex Awards poem springs to mind) the process drags on and on and is tinged with a note of panic as the deadline approaches.

For me, the writing process is a continuous game of free association. A poem for a grief counseling newsletter starts out with lists of how you feel in the wake of a loss, how you are shaken and battered by events, but eventually come out the other end..and the metaphor that pops out of the lists is a pinball machine. That works, and I have my poem.

Then comes the inevitable question about editing. I used to say I didn't edit. But when I actually look at what I do...well, I guess I do. Usually I edit on the fly and rearrange lines and phrases and words as I type. Or look at the printed product and start juggling things around. Hardly ever do I sit and cross out words on a handwritten copy. I type my first draft and save it to disk, then mess with it some more over the period of time I have before it's due. And sometimes even after that. Sometimes I find a better word. Sometimes I realize I could make more sense if I moved things around. Sometimes I just look at it and say "What a piece of crap" and start over. But I never throw things away. There's always the possibility that I can cannibalize old pieces of stuff and come up with something new. In fact, when I'm really stuck, I will often go back and read everything I've written--finished or unfinished, good or bad--and I can usually come up with something that incorporates one good phrase that was enmeshed in a pile of bad or trite (same thing, really) verbiage (is it just coincidence that that word SOUNDS like 'garbage'?) I am an avid recycler in that respect.

And thus I meander through my explanation--sort of. It's far easier to point to people who do it well: Billy Collins for instance, who polishes his little nugget of insight down to four trenchant lines that say everything there is to say about divorce. Or the poem Hardware, where the poet talks about nuts and bolts and wingnuts for two stanzas and somehow tells you without speaking it aloud that he is grieving for his father. Or Joseph Awad, whose poem Generations speaks so eloquently of a father's love for his son that it makes me cry every time I read it. Or the poem whose name and author I can't remember (God, how I wish I could find it again!) about a woman who berates her husband for coming home from the supermarket with the wrong brand of just about everything--then turns that into a grateful acknowledgment that that was how he picked her to marry. (I guess you have to read the poem, but it is a great one, I assure you.)

I guess all I can say is that I'm thankful that I have this position that makes me consider things that are more important than my usual fare, and discuss them with other people. Ideas are what keep us going, after all.