8.Question:There is also the flavor of religion and a soupçon of mysticism in the book.What place do you feel the spiritual has in your writing?
I would say it’s paramount. Having said that, I detest dogma. I think it’s about power and manipulation and it’s anathema to spirituality. I have studied mysticism all my life. I have a very good idea why religions are uncomfortable with it. My sense of writing is that it’s my collaboration with the divine, and in that sense it doesn’t belong entirely to me. I regard it as an act of prayer.
9. Question: In the poem, TWO AND TWO, you say: “We are as removed as the absent wife, as hurt by loss and now somehow unsafe because a small insult to good order and intent proves as desolate as war.
” In LARGEMOUTH CLASS, you say,
“ We have too much to say.
The world's too small to say it in;
it's getting smaller and
we're getting louder.”
Is there a connection between the stanzas of these two poems?What is that connection?
Two and Two is about putting two and two together and perhaps coming up with twenty-two. There a little café I go to quite often, and one day the extraordinarily vivid and endearing wife of the owner just vanished. The day before she had told me she had had to fire one of the counter girls, a very pretty but strikingly surly young woman. I felt bereft. I used to look forward to this woman’s presence, and I was worried about her. When I asked about her they said she was just working at home on taxes. But I didn’t believe that and so I wrote the poem, Two and Two, as a plausible explanation of her disappearance. I’m still waiting to see if my poem is on the mark. I posited in the poem that some had deeply hurt her and that she was somewhere wounded and had left a big hole in others’ lives. Some people fill a room and you feel like wallpaper. This woman filled a room with her good will and spirit. So yes, the two poems are about loss, about being wounded, secretly. The fired counter girl’s surliness was loud and oppressive, because her good looks enabled her to bully people. I think the owner’s wife saw that and didn’t want it, but I don’t know if it’s connected to her disappearance. I think poetry is often detective work. Or you could put it another way, you could say it’s like the search for algorithms in mathematics or the search for elixirs in alchemy.
10.Question: When you are writing a poem or a novel,at what point do you know when it's going to work, that it will do what you want it to do?How do you know when it’s finished?
The central character says, Okay, that’s it, thank you. Usually the central character is not the one I thought would be the central character. Rather, it’s someone who emerges and keeps establishing a relationship with me. Very often it’s the most taciturn of the characters I’m dealing with. I feel a compulsion to explore the taciturnity.
11.Question: Do you have any rituals or superstitions about writing?Will you talk aboutabout your work habits? Do you have certain set times when you write? Do you write every day?
I write almost every day. But I have no set time. I write everything in pocket notebooks. Usually I’m walking when I write. Out in the street or on a road. Or sometimes I pull the car over and write in my notebook. Then I sit in front of the computer and transcribe my notes. At that point I usually write more, but the initial impulses almost always come during walks. I just think best on my feet. I’ve tried using a hand-held recorder, but my own voices annoys me. I like to study how I scribbled something down. It tells me a lot. If my handwriting is deliberate and orderly, I know I had been thinking about something for some time, but if it’s hurried and a bit chaotic I know that I was trying to capture a fleeting recognition, something my mind was trying to resist, and then I ask myself what was in the content that I was resisting. I also am helped by seeing how I connect words and phrases and corrections with sweeping arabesques or minimalist straight lines. All this notation tells me something. When I was a young reporter I very often had trouble figuring out my own notes, but I notice in my old age that I always seem to understand them.
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