Poet Dean Young visited Smith yesterday and said many beautiful and interesting things about poetry during a question-and-answer session on his work. Here are some of his replies, to the best ability of my hurrying pen to capture them.
Writing isn’t separate from my life … There’s always room for writing. It’s automatic. It’s like, do you set time for sleeping? Or breathing? Sleeping, it’s most like sleeping. I can always do that.
On being asked what makes a poem
Poetry has to assert itself as a poem in some way. And it does that in relation to the conventions of poetry. Convention’s not a bad word. I like convention. Poetry isn’t a dumping ground for interesting writing.
After saying that when writing, he never knows what he’s doing
Sometimes you’ll find something, and it’s like ‘Aha – a literary device.’ Then you’ll write four or five poems that are good, because for a little while you know how to write a poem. But the imagination isn’t going to tolerate that for long.
His writing pedagogy
A focus on describing what is there. I try not to judge a poem.
On how he writes his poetry
It’s not a Tinguely machine. Tinguely machines are those wonderful machines that throw themselves apart. But that’s not what I’m after. I aim for a poem that has a kind of emotional discovery system.
I try to respond to what’s already in the poem. And something emerges.
Form is created by exclusion.
I’m almost ready to say that poems have souls and that’s why we go to them. But I’m not quite ready to say that.
Breton talks about “putting your trust in the inexhaustible murmur.”
I never have an idea for a poem, never. I sit down to a blank sheet of paper with a blank mind.
Poems are always in the specifics.
On his process of revision
Writing and revision aren’t separate for me, they’re one process … With poems, I either have something in the first seven or eight run throughs, or I don’t. And if I don’t, I probably won’t.
I’m not too interested in poetry that tries to convince me that it has something by drops of sweat fallen from the brow. I’m interested in the bared nerve.
What matters is that whatever you do, you do it. You make a decision and you stick by it … Art as a decision-making process in a charged field. It doesn’t matter what the decision is. The important thing is that decisions are made.
A lot of times you just have to cross out the lines that stink. And then, oh good, there’s the poem. But a lot of times you have to cross out lines that are good, that are not guilty. They’re just not contributing.
On creating white space and tonal variation within poems to give the strong lines room to breathe
Don’t surround them with a lot of loud noise, because that will rob the intensity.
On whether he thinks about his audience as he writes (and answering “no”)
An artist is someone who’s always looking forward. The audience and the critic can only be behind her. They can only follow. The artist’s back is always to the audience. She can’t be turning back, and saying, ‘What do you think about that?’
On being asked, ‘But you’re a published poet – surely you must consider the needs of your audience?’
You have it backwards. You become a public poet because you have an audience. pause … It’s not my fault!
Whatever’s wrong with your work, it’s not what’s wrong. It’s what you’re trying to do with your poems. Never ‘fix’ your poems … You think it’s a mistake? It’s not a mistake. It’s a portal of discovery.
Often people laugh when I give a reading. And I never know what they’re going to laugh at.
It’s not a social communication to me, poetry. For one thing, it’s words on the page, not words out loud. And I really think of poems that way.
How do you know what to put in and take out?
Listen. Listen really hard. I think that your ear knows when things should be over. Duration for me is really important for form. For me, form has a lot to do with just duration …. The answer for me is never content. It’s style.
Sometimes the best endings are abrupt. Sometimes it’s not a good thing to tie things together.
I can tolerate confusion. I can tolerate noise in music. I can tolerate a lot of disjunction and not knowing what’s going on.
On being asked how he deals with discouragement and frustration during times when form doesn’t disclose itself; how does he not give up
It’s a sickness. It’s like malaria, writing malaria. And every time it happens, there’s no reason to think it will end … except that I’ve been through it before. I also believe you can’t wait out those periods, you have to write out those periods. Writing well is easy, it’s wonderful. But writing like crap is really really hard. But you have to do it. … I’ve been through a lot of these cycles. Now when I go through one of these periods, it’s easier, because I recognize the sickness.
On his aims in the poem “Even Funnier Looking Now”“
I was allowing as much of my experiences in life to pile up on each other. It was a real pinball effect … it has this including madness to it. I tell my students, as soon as you have a poem where you think everything can go in, you need to end it. [On the poem’s ending:] It’s elegaic, it ends as an upside-down love poem. [With the end sounds of “snow” and “box,” I wanted] to make a kind of cross stitch to bring the machine to a close … It had exhausted its capacity to keep my attention.
On the title of “Red Glove Thrown in a Rosebush”
[I was interested in the] juxtaposition of two types of red, and in a soft thing in a barbed environment. The title was the last thing thrown on the poem. What I’m interested in is a synaptic gap between the title and the poem … rather than a title that sticks to the poem like label glue. I think of titles as lines of poetry. It’s possible that this was a line of the poem that I couldn’t get settled in the poem and that I didn’t want to lose.
I often read the table of contents first, and if the table of contents is boring, I won’t read the book.
On how the red glove has great personal resonance for him: I believe the investment of a great deal of meaning into something that the reader doesn’t know invests a kind of emblematic energy in it.
On his idea that language is a genius
How meaning will come into a sentence, possess it even when it’s not intended, that’s genius to me.
The title of this post is what Dean Young wrote in my signed copy of “Bender.”
Naila, I LOVE this. So much good advice. Thanks for sharing. Will keep and read, and re-read and read again. “Writing malaria.” Wow!
I agree, Dina! Many of these comments have become aphorisms for me that I return to again and again.