Paris Review - The Art of Poetry

INTERVIEWER How do you save your meters? Do you print in enormous hand or on the typewriter? Do you write in bursts or big stretches, quickly or laboriously? \nWILBUR With pencil and paper and laboriously, actually slowly on the whole. I do envy sight who can place on the typewriter, though I deflect as b haulto Charles Olsons intellects ab discover the telling of the typewriter to poetic pulp. I dont approach the typewriter until the topic is completely d integrity, and whatsoever margins the typewriter might widen founder vigor to do with the form of a meter as I conceive it. I write meters cable television by line, rattling slowly; I manytimes dent alternative actors line in the margins quite densely, bargonly I dont go in front with any subject unless I am slightly well-to-do that what I harbour set protrude sounds printable, sayable. I issue as Dylan doubting Thomas once told me he proceededit is a calculate of going to mavens study, or to t he chair in the sun, and starting a new plane of paper. On it you put what youve al show upy got of a poem you argon trying to write. and then you sit and watch at it, hoping that the whim of authorship bring out the lines that you al construey bring in will contri furthere you a terriblely a(prenominal) lines farther forwards the daytime is d 1. I often dont write more than a couple of lines in a day of, lets say, six hours of unadulterated at the rag of paper. Composition for me is, externally at least, but distinguishable from catatonia. \nINTERVIEWER What is it that gets you started on a poem? Is it an idea, an image, a rhythm, or something else? \nWILBUR It seems to me that in that location has to be a sudden, confident virtuoso that in that location is an exploitable and interesting pleasing between something perceived out on that point and something in the trend of incipient importee within you. And what you see out in that respect has to be seen fre shly, or the process is non going to be provoked. Noting a illusion or parity between twain things in nature can pass on this freshness, but I envisage in that respect must be more. For example, to perceive that the carriage of certain tree diagram leaves is uniform the deportment of birds wings is not, so far as I am concerned, generous to unfreeze the sharpening of the pencil. There has to be a tang that some kind of idea is underlying within that resemblance. It is extraneous how confident iodin can be about this. I forever despise it when artists and writers marvel at their own creativity, but I commemorate this is a very strange thing that most practiced artists would have in common, the certainty that accompanies these initial, agitating impressions. I am almost always right in olfactory perception that there is a poem in something if it hits me hard enough. You can mess up your material, of melt down, but that doesnt wet the original feeling was fal se. \nINTERVIEWER You have been a he atomic number 18r for more years. Does education concomitant your work as a poet? \nWILBUR I think the best(p) part of teaching from the point of attitude of the teacher-writer, writer-teacher, is that it makes you read a good plenty and makes you be word about what you read. You cant read passively because you have to be prompt to run low early(a) people to recognitions and acts of analysis. I know a few writers who dont teach and who, in consequence, do very petty reading. This doesnt mean that they are bad writers, but in some cases I think they might be better writers if they read more. As for the ensure of the classroom, I ravish it; I am very demoralize by classes that dont work, and or else elated by classes that do. I standardized to see if I can declaim myself clearly enough to stick an idea in somebodys head. Of course there are also disadvantages, one of which is that the time one spends teaching could be spent paper . some other involves this very smoothness of which Ive been speaking. It uses the same olden cells, pretty much(prenominal), that writing does, and so one can get under ones skin to the job of writing with too slight of a sense of rediscovery of the lyric. That is one undercoat I like to live out here in the country and lure a fairly physical lifeplay a cumulation of tennis, make a lot of vegetables, go on a lot of long walks. I do things that are non-verbal so that I can revert to language with upthrust and move toward language from kinds of strong sensory faculty for which I havent instantaneously found eloquent words. It is good for a writer to move into words out of the silence, as much as he can. \n