{ in this interview, poet david wright discusses craft, inspiration, and revision }
when you picture someone reading your poetry, how do you see them? what do they think about, wear, and do? or, maybe a better way to say it: who do you write for? and how do you see your writing nourishing others?
Two things come to mind. First, how the hell do I know? I mean, I hope that a person who reads the poems comes to them with a generous spirit and that the poem rewards that generosity in such a way that she’ll want to return to the poem (or another one) again. But you can’t (and shouldn’t) control that. It’s a reader’s freedom to come to a poem with whatever needs and hopes he carries around all the time. If the poem meets the reader there, I suppose that’s grace or at least happy accident. The second thought is that, often, I write post card poems directly to other people–friends, colleagues, former students–and then I am absolutely picturing this person fetching the poem from the mail and being pleased, confounded, surprised. I love writing poems like this.
how do you use poetry as a practice for spiritual exploration, discipline, or growth? can you offer any practical advice or sure-fire practices for folks interested in allowing writing to inform their spiritual discipline?
Over the years, poems have helped me learn, reflect, maybe even grow a bit. I still have lines in my head from poems I memorized decades ago, or poems I teach every year (“tell it slant” comes to mind, or “death is the mother of beauty” or “what to make of a diminished thing”). These come back to me often like little bits of liturgy, and in that way they feel spiritual. The concentration, precision, and music of the language lodges itself in my memory and my senses and, I think, is what gives it an ongoing value. Poetry doesn’t save anyone, but it can participate, sometimes, in helping us pay attention to the saving and damaging stuff that makes up our world.
when you approach your desk, journal, computer—where ever it is you tend to create—what are some of the processes you use? what’s going through your mind? tell us about your habits of writing, no matter how quirky, mundane, strange, or small.
Lately, I keep drafts of poems, or individual lines in my gmail drafts. Then, when I sit down to write, I’ll often just open the email and start writing. I also have a weekly writing group with other faculty on campus. These folks are writing critical prose or dissertations or whatever, but we all sit in the same room and work together for a couple of hours one afternoon each week. It’s a little like going to the gym or the practice room as a musician. You’re there. They are working, so you might as well work too. Also, I always try to read something before I write.
when you go to revise work, how do you typically go about it? are there best practices you follow? give some wise instruction for those of us ready to get cracking on revision!
I tell students that writing is revision (which is not news to anyone whose been trying it for a while but is always a good reminder). When I revise, I try to listen to what I hear in the draft I wrote earlier–what buried conversations need to be highlighted, what dead ends have I started down, what stalling or writing my way to the core of the poem needs to be cut away. I also am very wary of my own tricks, so I try to make sure I’m not lazily falling back on something I do all the time: “Oh, look, dumbass, you’ve found your way to music again, and an epiphany!” Then, after being hard on myself like that, I’ll often open up a new window and write the poem fresh, point myself towards freedom again and see what happens.
what’s the best advice you can give to a person just beginning to write, struggling to write, or feeling stuck? what’s something you wish someone had told you starting out?
Two things people DID tell me starting out that I needed to know. First, read, both canonical texts and contemporary stuff. Read to be saturated with language. Read for pleasure. Read for instruction or to feel something. Read to get pissed off. Read generously, the way you’d like to be read. And the other bit of advice an instructor gave me when I was an undergrad and had stuffed every idea I had down the throat of one poem: you don’t need to do everything in this one piece, David; you could always write another poem.
would you like to share a poem you’re working on or have recently finished and comment on how it was written in light of the comments above?
Here’s a recent poem that found its way to life during one of those Thurs. afternoon writing sessions I mentioned above:
How to Watch Tonight’s Blood Moon
I followed all the expert advice: at the moon’s perigee
I rowed myself deep into the night and anchored even
deeper in the Pacific’s heart. Beneath the earth’s umbra,
I stopped believing in blood as a season of the moon,
trained the iphone lens on the western blue and waited
for moonset. I woke all but covered in worry and sea foam.
Small black and white birds called out a nonsense verse
in an island dialect. My boat listed, half-full of blooded water.
I had been lulled into dreams of Illinois autumn where hunters
and harvesters take the moon seriously as a version of gospel,
where we stalk dinner through dark orange fields of corn wide
as sea scapes. I flailed for my phone, for oars and, finding nothing
in my hands, filled them with red ocean and swam into the sky.
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David Wright teaches creative writing and American literature at Monmouth College (IL). His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in Image, Quiddity, Ecotone, Poetry East, and Another Chicago Magazine, among others. His most recent poetry collection is The Small Books of Bach (Wipf & Stock, 2014). He can be found online at sweatervestboy.tumblr.com and on twitter @sweatervestboy.
