A final note on what I’ve learned about poetry by writing it. I make no claims for the quality of my own poetry. This is just what writing it calls to mind.
Poetry feels like writing forced through multiple filters. That is true of all writing. Filters are meant to remove impurities, extraneous mush, that which does not belong. But prose operates with both addition and subtraction, with both purification and embellishment, while poetry feels like each filter is of a smaller gauge than the one above it, so that as the revision process goes on, what emerges is cleaner, clearer, more exact, more defined, the images sharper, the verbs and nouns more solid in the weight of associations they are meant to carry. It feels like writing driven ruthlessly toward both brevity and density simultaneously, as if one is compressing a star. You want the most brilliant light to emerge from the most precise form.
I try to be fiercely aware of sentimentality in my poetry and of the fine line between depth of feeling and mawkishness. I try to cut out bathos or what might be nostalgia, any emotion that feels ‘wrong’, untrue, inaccurate and inhuman.
There is a blind spot at work in all writing, and in writing poetry, it seems especially dark and wide because poetry so often tries to describe experiences or feelings that hover around the edges of our consciousness. Many times I’m not quite sure what it is I’m pursuing except I know it’s there. I know it. Something is moving around and breathing out there. My job is to find the words that bring it into the lines and images that give it its due, a small life on the page.
