this is the deepest conversation I've ever had about writing Dana Joya is going to walk us through not just the tactics of what it takes to write well first drafts and editing and how to read well but also the life that you got to live to be world class was the sacrifice the dedication what does the work ethic look like that's what this conversation
is about you've discovered that for you first drafts are a quasi mystical process when I'm doing literary writing my ins spiration is involuntary and my artistic uh process consists of confusion followed by Madness exhilaration and despair uh I feel the inspiration physically when I have a poem coming I feel it in my
temples and I feel it in my throat and it is beyond words it's you know it's it's in a different medium and I but there's a one line or an image or whatever that's the transitional point from whatever this invisible thing is to the page and if I'm going I write in a kind of frenzy and then 30 minutes 45 minutes later it just vanishes and then
I'm left with what I have on the on the page which is always a mess and you know part of what I need to do is to look at that and to find the poem that's hidden but it's even that way for pros I mean I'll be wanting to write about a certain subject and I just don't have the entry and then suddenly it comes from nowhere
and uh I've got to get it down then or I'll lose it so what happens if you're at dinner or you're asleep I lose it I have you have no idea uh how many good things I've lost because I'm driving or I'm in a meeting or I'm in an elevator and I don't have the 30 minutes just to sit there and write it down sometimes
I'll write down one or two things and I'll next day I'll look at it and I'll say what the hell was I writing I do think that really good writing uh comes both from the conscious mind and the unconscious mind and a good writer uh can make the two of them sort of dance a duet has this changed throughout your career I do two kinds of
writing in a general sense you could say half of it journalistic and the other half is literary artistic for journalistic writing I can sort of sit down and I can write the piece U I may not always have the lead but you know once again if you have the lead uh which comes as a kind of inspiration the piece will write itself but when I'm writing
journalistic articles what I'm basically telling you is what I already know when I'm writing literary writing or artistic writing the writing the piece writing the poem is for me a way of figuring out what the heck it is I want to say suddenly when I write something that's good that way I'll realize I've been
writing it in the back of my mind for years and I had all these things and they never came together until now but it but uh it surprises me you know Robert Frost says no surprise for the writer no surprise for the reader and a lot of stuff I read just has no surprises it's well done in a conventional way and you know you can
have a kind of distant admiration for it but the pieces that really grab you by your throat you can tell that they astonish the writer astonished is a good word I just finished writing an opera for kids and you know they said what's the message and this that and the other and I said said no what I want is to create a sense of
wonder and I think that that's one of the primary things that literary writing does is to give you a sense of wonder of awe of Joy often from things that you see every day but you've never seen in quite the same way and uh you know if you don't have that I think the writing to me at least feels impoverished so
give me an example I want to hear from a poem of something that maybe has a more emotional texture what the inspiration looked like what it felt like the words the sensations that came to mind and then how you turned that into the first draft I'll have a poem and I'll I'll work on it and you know it'll come in a couple lines and I'll develop it into
maybe 15 20 lines and then I'll just stop sometimes because you know I've got a whole emotional Arc and narrative Arc there's a poem of mine that's basically about these two people that meet at a wedding they have a moment but nothing really happens and it's a it's a really nice poem and and I I finished I said
but it's not enough and and I waited a couple of months and then suddenly I realized there's a turn at the end and the last you know maybe eight lines of it 12 lines of it is about the guy remembering this 20 years later you know and suddenly he goes there are so many might have bends what ifs that won't stay buried other cities other jobs
strangers we might have married then what what happens is that this is good and this is good but when you join them up like that they both be uh double in their energy sure and so I'll start saying something and I'll say it with all the power that I can have and I'm at the point where you're about to say stop it stop it and then suddenly I'll say
almost the opposite I'll have push that inside as far as we can do and once I've got you totally emotionally involved for or against it then I suddenly qualify it and when you do this it has a kind of energy and it's the energy that comes from debate from argumentation and I think great writers uh are able to to look at both
sides of an argument William Butler Yates the poet said out of arguments with others uh we make politics out of arguments with ourselves we make poetry and so I realized early on that most of the poems that I read the new poems that I've read will be I'm sad I'm sad I'm sad I'm sad the end or I'm happy I'm
happy I'm happy the end and I'm much more interested where you have one emotional thing that takes you up and as you are raised by it or or depressed by it suddenly you realize that the opposite is true or something happens that that triggers this I call it a turn U and I like to have turns in my writing I did it first of all in my poetry but
but I realized in my Pros it's actually sometimes even more powerful because you don't lose anybody in Pros you know sometimes in a poem If you're not in the right mood you can't quite follow it I started off as a journalist in high school in college in grad school I was writing reviews I was writing essays and things like that and I got to be very
good at journalistic Pros which I think is something that every writer needs to master because it's the basic medium it's the lingua franka of writing or even broadcast and then I be you I was writing poetry and I had this kind of divided world that my poetry was was clear concise rational um and and my poetry was kind of of impression you
know impressionistic emotional imagistic and then I realized that my I needed to take everything I knew as a poet and uh bring it to my pros and once I did this I I really U became a much much better Pros writer you know sometimes the advice I would give some people is that I write Pros in two ways there's the piece
that's going to be read on Monday and then there's the piece I want to be have read in 50 years and I take a very different strategy for both of them so I'm the least uh marketable writer you could possibly imagine I mean people will ask me for a piece and I won't give it to them I'll finish a piece and I say no it's not ready that actually has been I
think the key to my success is saying no there's a real stubbornness about you and also your brother in that way well you know I'm stubborn but I'm not a stubborn his Tad you know you he he's well but it's the same thing I mean for example I'm so old that I've lived through a major transformation of culture when I was a
young man all information was was in books in print in magazines in newspaper now uh that is really a historical period most information now is electronic it's digital it's audio it's on film we've gone from a culture of Silent print on a page to living language in film or audio and and it's actually brings us back to the origins
of of of literature the origins of of human consciousness and that's not a bad time for a poet to be alive because poetry is a technology that's older than writing right and so actually as a poet especially the kind of poet I am which I use form meter rhyme and things like that the culture is closer uh to what poetry is about than it is what a novel
is about or what a print book is about but anyway um I wrote an article which I think is one of the best things I've ever written called disappearing Inc poetry at the end of print culture Lewis lapam of Harper's bought he oh this is a great essay it's really really important but then he so he PA me a nice advance
and he says well but Dan I want you to begin on the East Village where you're going to a poetry slam and people are doing this that and the other and I thought about it and I said no I don't want to do that and so I sent him back his check and I took it and I published it in the Hudson review so rather than publish it in a magazine with a quarter
of a million readers or whatever Harper had I publish it Magazine with 2500 readers and the article did not have anywhere near the impact uh that it would have but I had it the way I wanted it to be and uh I paid for it you know I paid for my uh uh my I don't know what you call it Integrity but I don't regret
that uh you know because I feel that if I write really well my pieces last and not people read this and they go how did you know this in the 1990s everything you say has come true so I get a kind of postumus Fame I guess in the same way I gave this this lecture at the new yor public library and a couple of editors
wanted it and one was from the Atlantic and so I said yeah I'd love to do it and this is what became really the most famous piece I've ever written called can poetry matter of course it's probably the most best known essay on poetry for the last 30 40 years I sent it to them the next morning Bill Whitworth the editor of the Atlantic
called him said Dana this is terrific uh we're going to publish it and I said no let's not publish it he say what and he and I said well you know I reread it last night and I don't think it's done and he said what do you mean it's not done I it's perfectly ready to go and I said no no and I started talking about what I thought was wrong with it and
then about two months later I gave it to him and it had the beginning was the same the end was the same but I added a section in the middle which I think made it a much much better piece and I gave it to him and he says he says you're right it's much much better I was smart enough not to say thank God the you know
the Atlantic wants me the New Yorker wants me you know to maintain a certain distance and that's a piece ended up generating more mail than any article in the entire history of the Atlantic Monthly so tell me this do you ever feel like you're writing and you're so in love with your work that you're like oh
my goodness it's so good or do you feel like you don't even have that Gene or you used to have that Gene you've kind of relinquished it and you're now able to look at your work more objectively now oh the older you get I think the more objective you become about your work or the more deluded but I think if you're a professional writer you get to
be a pretty good judge of your work but writing is like everything else in life you know with somebody you go oh they're so funny then 20 minutes later they're so annoying you have these these swings and so that's what I say my writing I you throw yourself into it you have this big thing and it looks really good and
the next morning you read it and you go it's all you see are the fals yeah I just published a a book uh on opera called weep shudder die and I began it about 20 years ago I wrote this P I'd written an opera and people wanted to ask me about what was it like to write the the words and lyrics of an opera so I wrote this little piece and I never
reprinted it because I said you know it's not as good as it could be then it got to be a little bit longer and finally I was bringing a book of essays out and uh it was just too long and so I just told the publisher I'm going to just take it out and uh I began working on it he said well why don't you just you know we'll use it as a little medium
piece and you can publish the scripts of your operas the liti and so it's a great idea so we're putting the libr together but piece got longer and longer and longer and finally it ended up being a book the sad part about it is that it needed 20 years to be you like person need needed to grow into its form but in
the last 3 months when I was working on it I'd write a chapter it would look good the next morning I think it was terrible I tear it apart and I did it again and again and again and I just said to myself this is a book I'm not going to make any money off of my publisher is just publishing it because he's intrigued by the idea so you know
it came out in December which is the worst time for a book to come out I don't know why my publisher wanted to do that but I was so grateful for him to be the one to sort of make the thing happen that I didn't complain um and people have told me that uh I've had one One reviewer said this and several my friends said this they started to read
it and they read it in one sitting they couldn't put it down and and that's what I was trying to get I'm trying with my literary writing to write a book that will last longer than I do what actually lasts and doesn't get Swept Away by the current of culture when I'm writing uh for the I'm writing for now and thereafter I
don't it's not like I'm saying no one will understand my book for 30 years no no no if they don't if it isn't if it isn't good the day that the book is published you're finished but the question is what makes it last what are the really basic issues I'm dealing with and see this is the funny thing is that most writers don't do that they're
focused on the issue of the moment or if they're academics they're they're focused on some you know chain of of references and citations and everything else so what I try to do is Imagine two or three readers that are at very different stages of their life kind of a bright teenager that doesn't know much
you know a fellow writer who knows probably too much and a person who's sort of in between who's kind of you know you know reads poetry or reads about music and say what can I say that all three of them will say yeah okay that's an interesting question or what can I say that two of the three don't even know about and the other one I'm
going to get an angle that will surprise you know him or her and so I really do think about what to put in and what not to put in but I will spend uh a whole day working on a paragraph that has a couple of examples my brother does this too history of asked what songs do you mention what poems do you mention what operas do you
mention and I'll go through there and I'll make okay from this angle how does that work from this angle how does that work this angle doesn't work and then Suddenly It's like hearing a chord strike you go yes I've got the right combination some of it's rational some of it's intuitive but I really do try to strip away the things that are ephemeral
I try to get at the things that are more meaningful if I'm going to have an example I try to have an example that I know it's going to be around in 20 years or if it isn't that I explain that somebody else you know will get so that's why it's very important for me to be have one of my imaginary reader is a younger person who doesn't know very
much bright curious alert but doesn't have a lot of background so if I'm going to give him a fact I got to explain why I'm giving it to them and so you know it's it's a balancing act but I'm the worst possible example for a young writer because you know i' I I walk away from things that most people would run
toward I say no to kind invitations uh and it's because I know what I'm doing is very difficult and it has to be done just right there's some wisdom that people always offer you know well if you're going to write you know you've got to write from the heart you've got to write from the innermost portion of
yourself and that's really good as a Hal truth because if you're really a good writer you're writing from your personality from your perspective there's a tremendous sense of individuality uh in your writing but the only way that you can bring that across is to master this impersonal communal technique the very notion of of language is a
social uh construction sure I mean which is that you know we have ways of of saying things or not saying things so in order to write well you have got to immerse yourself in all the ways that language works you got to see how it doesn't work the philosopher schopenhauer you know was uh said you can never read bad books too
little you can never read good books too much and I think it's you know that's why you've got to read really good writing and see how it works so you don't buy the idea of read everything good stuff bad stuff you're like I'm GNA focus on the good stuff yeah no you you got to read everything but you've got to figure out what's good and what's not
good you can learn many things things from writers and one of the ones and this is a little bit beyond the scope of your question is they can show you examples of how writers lead their lives you know we're born into whatever family I was lucky my parents were rather poor but in every other respect they were just great
parents and they put their kids uh first and and we had a a wonderful kind of of of uh environment I think both Ted and I were taught self-esteem I mean we just you know we didn't ever had to really struggle for it but I needed to know how the heck to lead my life I just I when I was about 20 I literally woke up one morning and knew that I was going
to be a poet it took me almost entirely by surprise until then I thought I was going to be a composer but when it came it came with an absolute assurance and really for the next 50 years I haven't changed my mind a bit but I had no idea what it meant to be a poet what what do poets do with their their lives and so I
needed to find writers who became kind of my patron saints who gave me examples of how you get through all the the uh struggles and dramas of Life first did that I thought I was going to do what everybody does become a professor but after you know uh going through Stanford going to Harvard graduate school I realized I did not want to be a
professor I realized for a poet that was an extremely bad decision it gave you Economic Security but it put you in a kind of hot house you know for your writing and I did not want to be a poet who uh you had to go to graduate school to be able to read I wanted the people I came from uh who were sort of
uh bright Working Class People to be able to respond to my poetry just the way that you know people with better education good so I had to go off and figure out what I was going to do for my life and so two poets became very important to me TS Elliott and Wallace Stevens now it's not because they are great American modernists it because TS
Elliot had a day job in a bank Wallace Stevens was an insurance lawyer so I had the example of two great poets who uh worked in Elliot's case five and a half days a week and still found you know time to not just write but to be one of the most important writers of the 20th century I learned from them first of all that it was possible and secondly you
know I saw how they conducted their lives so I think people need role models for their journey through life and I'll say this I don't think uh that you can say there's no connection between your writing and your life I mean you're your writing comes out of your life the choices you make for your life so you better make them
wisely when you say your life what do you actually do all day what does your day look like what does your week look like I I I actually don't I realizing I don't really have a sense for that let me give you what my day was like at two stages in my life okay I had had a job since I was nine you know I worked
during college I worked during vacation even in Easter vacation I would come back for a week and I'd have a job set up because I you know we had no money and so I went to Business School uh and no one in the history of Stanford Business School graduated doing less work than I did because I spent three to four hours every day reading and writing
for literary things and so I managed my business school studies in a very businesslike manner I achieved three things at Stanford I uh for two years I was publishing at least one piece a week in the Stanford daily or uh some magazine in San Francisco secondly I got my MBA and most importantly I met my wife then I went to New York so for the next
15 years this is what my day would look like I'd get up about 7: a.m. I'd gulp down a cup of coffee and I drive through terrible traffic uh uh to work and I would work for 10 hours and so I was really forced to the fact that I never had a really long period of time to work on anything so what your life is think
of it as like a wallet full of one hour bills I'm going to take this hour this this hour that and you only have 24 hours you know to spend every day and so I said to myself I had three important things in my life I had my my marriage and my family I had my job which I had to have because I had no money and then
the third thing was the writing and if I could do all three of those things but I couldn't have added a fourth and it worked but it was it had to have this real Focus so when I was at my business time almost every hour of every day was budgeted so that's what I looked like in New York uh I was totally disciplined so I quit my job at one
point and I just became a literary journalist I began editing books I began working with musics and we nearly went bankrupt for about two years and then basically it all started working and so finally I decided to come back here because I I had two small boys and I wanted them to know their grandparents I wanted them to
know that they came from working class Latins my dad's Italian my mom's Mexican because in New York they were being raised as generic upper middle class kids you know kind of without any much of an identity and so up here I spend two or three hours a day in the morning doing physical labor uh just to keep the the natural landscape healthy around me
then I'll work for a couple of hours I'll have lunch I'll do a couple more hours of physical labor and then I'll work if I'm really uh pressed on a deadline or something I'll have dinner then I'll work in the evening in New York it was office work you know and and literary work here it's physical work and literary work I learned something
you know when I came here which is that I'll be working on something and I'll come to an impass you know I'll say I don't know where this poem is going or I don't I'm writing let's say I'm writing a the the this Libretto for an opera The Script for an opera I I won't know where what these two characters are going to
do and I'll go out and I'll prune a tree for an hour uh you know cut away the dead wood and things like that or I'll drag the stuff down and while I'm doing that my unconscious works it out then I'll come back to here it's solved and so what I've learned here is the uh the benefit of physical labor and the benefit of sh cutting off your
rational mind and keeping yourself busy and everything else so your unconscious can kind of work and I think for a poet or for a literal writer that's very invaluable years ago you know when I I needed you know when I left Washington DC I needed money so I took a job at USC each fall semester and I had a big
poetry class uh 215 students it was a very popular class one of the things I would do is I would um I would take you know like like a really set of keys and I would just throw them at some at some guy that struck me as kind of a athletic and he would just go and he would catch it and i' said well did I tell you to
catch it and he said well no Professor I said but why'd you do it well they were coming up there I said yeah because your body has all this intelligence in it poetry likes that kind of intelligence poetry likes The rhythms of your body and the movements of your body and so I realized that for me as a poet the more physical intelligence
I could put in my poems the better they were because the one thing we have in common is the same body you know we have hearts and lungs and we the kind of rhythms of of living are very much the same and you can feel those things you know you can feel this you create things where the sound does the work years ago there's a a jazz pianist named Helen
son and Helen wanted to do an album of vocals and so she asked me if I I would write the the lyrics and I said well we start talking about what it would be so now at the same time that that was happening I found out that this this girl I dated uh in my early 20s beautiful girl I mean she was so beautiful it was a
curse you know and she she had died she had died I think at 50 and uh I began thinking about what a curse Beauty was and this is the lyric that I wrote It's called pity the Beautiful pity the Beautiful the dolls and the dishes the babes with big daddies granting their wishes pity the pretty boys the hunks and Apollos the golden
Lads whom success always follows the hotties The Knockouts the tens out of 10 the drop dead gorgeous the great Leading Men pity The Faded the bloated the blousy the ponchy Adonis whose luxs gone lousy pity the gods no longer Divine pity the night the Stars lose their shine whether that's a good poem or a bad poem I can't I can't be the one
to judge but I do know that I can read that to 13-year-old girls or 80y old men and every everybody gets it it's so easy yeah and everybody feels the beat yeah and when you take a phrase like Drop Dead Gorgeous you know everybody feels that as something they can put they can wrap their lips around you know and the
10 that attends feels so colloquial yeah it's exactly what it say to my friends yeah and on the other hand I could show it to a professor of Classics and they would say yeah that's the kind of poem that a Roman would have written you know during the the reign of Augustus you know cellus could have written that poem and I like that it's a poem that's
unpretentious uh but it's rooted in almost any angle that you look at it you talk about coming here to work and doing two to three working sessions a day and how do you think about production versus consumption because you're so well read but you've also produced so much and how do you balance those things I've written
so much people think that writing is easy for me and it isn't but it's because I work all the time time I'm happiest working if you are lucky enough to do the work you love you know I mean to me I want to to work the work I love and I want to be with the woman I love I don't need to go to Tasmania or you know Greenland or uh
P you know Patagonia to be interested I'm just fascinated by every day of my life doing the things that I love I write in such a way that anybody who's you know like yourself who's an expert on writers would say Dana you're impossible this is you have the stupidest you know kind of schedule well possible you know you don't do things
practically but to be practical is to do what works and what works with me is not what works you know for most people but I wanted to show you something because I don't think people uh very early on I would I would come across a piece of poetry and I would say God that's beautiful how do they do it and I have a whole book here of poems uh you know
that I love and you know I didn't do this all at once but I come across a poem a passage that I just say I love the way this sounds I write the poem in ink and I do all the notations in pencil I have the number of syllables I have the rhyme scheme I have where the metrical stresses fall where the speech stresses fall and so it gives me a sense
of how these people created sound so I've got I've got you know books you know like this how do you make time for that because that seems in the important but not urgent category and you showed me your office of all the projects that you're currently working on so what you're thinking about to go back to the
very beginning of our conversation is you're think about how do I block out my weeks and how do I really use my time well how do you think about cultivating the space in order to build this compounding knowledge most people waste most of their time you're time is your life you know you don't have any life that doesn't exist in time
so when you just waste time uh you never get it back and worst of all you become accustomed to the habit of wasting time the key to to uh getting things done is to not waste time and to love what you do I I'll write I'll be writing something and I'll just it's just not working I'll go and I'll just take an author I really like I'll take George
Orwell and I'll read two or three pages of Orwell and I say godamn it he writes gets me mad that he's writing so well so you know I'm gonna go I'll show George Orwell so I go back there and I write it and I'll look at my piece and I'll just say look at this crap that I was writing and I'll just start you know covering it
through I mean much of my writing process is to look at what I'm writing and say it's not good enough for the vision that I have inside my head of it and so I mean if you look at at where I work I mean this is you know I'll have a chapter and I'll go through it and I'll just tear it apart and I'll write it again and if you look at that 24 hours
later you know I'm writing I'm writing it yet again you know I'm going through every page I'll just take a paragraph I'll cut it out I'll say that it needs to be another paragraph and you just keep working on it this whole file that I've got here is pretty much the drafts of of one or two chapters from this this
book that I did and these are short chapters and what happens is it comes to a point where I suddenly I get it and it's radiating more energy that I can possibly put into it you know and that and I know it's done why do you use those words well I like the notion of of atomic energy you take some potentially radiant element and you apply energy and
you push and you push and you push then it comes to a point where it it begins to radiate energy on its own when you're dead and gone it's going to be on a page and somebody can either open that page you know and participate in it or they can't I mean what I like about this book here is it's a book about Opera I got a
lot of stuff that's intellectual about the history of Opera but really what it's about is this weird art form that you go there and you watch and You Weep in the dark feeling the emotions of the people on the stage and there's this strange primitive transaction that happens in Opera that I wanted to capture in words so tell me
this is then you're writing that you're trying to put it into words what are you doing are you reading books about Opera are you talking to experts are you going to the Opera are you going on long walks what are you actually doing to take this felt sense that you have of weeping in the dark and that entire experience and
actually translate into language this book has the advantage of the fact that I you know have a lifetime of experience one of the most important things I learned as a poet and it spilled over into my Pros writing too is that is to leave things out because you know you you create a poem you create all these scaffoldings in your building it most
people leave the scaffolds this is one poet you know that you know remember his poem and it begin and he introduces the poem and reading he goes well you know I was in Cleveland and it was raining and I had just broken up with Trudy uh and uh I was heartbroken and I was walking down mclen Avenue in the rain and I had a copy of Garcia Lura you
know the scaffolding is all there and you and by the time you get to the poem you're worn out but more importantly by the time you get to the heart of that poem it's not your poem it's his poem he hasn't left any room for you but if I say pity the Beautiful the dolls and the dishes the babes with big daddies
granting their wishes pity the pretty boys the hunks and the Pao you you picture those things from your own life the beautiful girl in the audience and the ugly girl in the audience both go into that poem but by a different door she goes wow the pretty girl always get the favoritism and the other one goes yeah I'm you know I've got this kind of
pretty privilege leave enough out so people can bring their own life into the poem and so what I do here is I'm creating this argument about Opera and my argument is really quite simple which is that Opera is the most powerful form of poetic drama it's the most intense form of theater that exists I start tracing it and it's not really a
highbrow form it's actually a very popular form for which we have the barrier of language because most of them are in Italian or German or French you know just talking about the nature of song how you can feel the meaning of a song even though you don't know the words but I'm getting a very intellectual argument and it's a very
good argument it's a very original argument if I may say so but you know I'm not giving an a doorway into it for people that don't have a pre-existing interest I'm not creating a doorway for people who don't know about classical music music or don't know about at least musical theater but suddenly I talk about being raised in an immigrant
family having my father put on en Rico Caruso and tell me how good he is because he's Italian you know and when I this thing came out all these people wrote me and said yeah that was like my mother did this and my father did this often had nothing to do with Opera and so I I gave these people who you know
don't really have any pre you know uh pre-existing interest in in uh Opera a way of getting into it and they like it I'll give you an example of a thing that surprised me I wrote a a poem called reunion it began in the most mundane way possible I made the mistake of going to one of my Stanford reunions and uh I hardly knew anybody
there the only people that were there were people that I didn't never like to begin with OR didn't recognize and so I came back and I began to write a poem about being in a place that's supposed to be meaningful to you but you really can't you don't recognize anybody you it's almost like there's a drama going on around you that you should be part of
but you aren't 10 years later I'm giving a reading in P in P out to or Meno Park and this woman comes up to me so she comes up and she says I want to show you something and she has a framed copy of of my poem and then she takes the frame and she turns it around and there's a picture of an older man man who was her
is her father and she says this poem um she just explained my dad to me because he has Alzheimer's and this is how he must feel you know he's in this place that he should recognize he sort of recognizes the voices but he can't put the names to them and everything else and she go it was so important when I read this poem
because it helped me understand my dad and I said to myself well this this is not how I intended the poem to mean but it's exactly what I intended the poem to do which is to say to have an independent existence from my own intention and I think that that for me as a poet uh doing that was where I took my work to the next level not solving the
mystery keeping things out putting into the poem just what it needed and no more there's a lot of writing advice that basically is obsessed with condensing your writing using simple words and almost making it so accessible that it becomes Elementary that's probably not a fair way to put it but that's how it came out when is that true
and when do you just reject that well what you're describing right now is more or less the mandatory house style for much new fiction you look at these new novels and all the paragraphs are like one or two sentences long or they're all dialogue and they have this fear of uh having too many words you know having it be dare I say
too literary but I don't think books like that will survive in fact I don't even think books like that make much of an impression because what people really long for you know is for personality when you read Raymond chantler um you're looking for the plot you're looking for the characters but what you're given is
this fantastic sense of style and Sensibility you know he's in this uh kind of film Noir Los Angeles I mean he created what we think of as film Noir as much as any filmmaker uh did and once again he has these great sentences that embody it he goes she was the kind of woman that would make an Archbishop uh kick through
a stained glass window or his desk was not as big as Napoleon's tomb these kind of these ironic or these s you know these sardonic sentences and that's why he he remains popular now he had interesting plots but the plots have holes in them but you have the pleasure of narrative but it's the primary pleasure is the sensibility so I think you should write
as simply as possible I think should have no unnecessary words but there are also necessary words and and your writing should have a flavor if everything is is Diet uh vanilla you know uh you know it's not it's not going to be uh you know that not going to be a meal that you return to and so the real challenge for a beginning
writer is to say well I have to write for myself from my own EXP experience and to find out how to do that I mean Philip Clarkin is a wonderful example of a poet he took the most boring life possible and he became the greatest British poet of his generation because he found the Poetry of tedium of boredom of the frustrated
life of the guy that doesn't get the job the girl or the cash and you know he he he turns it into poetry my advice to a writer is to think about your own life and find the language the stories the character the tone to make it work there's a certain moment for you as a writer when you've developed a way of talking or a way of
writing where you find a subject matter that's just the right subject matter for you a tone that's just the one and suddenly The Voice goes from feeling artificial to Natural from artificial to interesting I was raised in a very Urban very ugly unmemorable uh second rate Urban landscape you know I didn't realize that
around the corner from my high school one of the great literary movements of the Modern Age would happen which is rap and they found a way of taking their crummy neighborhood and turning it into a kind of poetry it's not my kind of poetry but it's an interesting kind of poetry and it took me about you know 20 years to figure out how to write about
my own experience because you know I really wish that I could write about the Birch you know Woods of Robert Frost or you know the the ocean of Joseph Conrad or joh you know something like this but that wasn't my world when people are talking about not having their voice and they're frustrated I think that there's a few
things going on one of them is they don't feel a of confidence in their authentic self for their authentic story either they don't think that there's an interest in it or they just think that their life is completely trite and boring yeah and the other thing sort of the analogy that I like to think about is you can imagine an instrument and
you're just trying all these different instruments and what is the one that you play and you're just playing naturally and somehow it feels like it's has the potential to be perfectly tuned if only you give it work but then also other people like that sound and the challenge is that before you found that that it feels like this very
mysterious thing that maybe you'll never find and my sense is that once you find it you're like oh it's kind of just there the whole time something like that yeah everyone's life is trite and boring seen from some angle the problem sometimes people have is they don't really want to to admit anything that's embarrassing or shameful right and so
they want to you know you know to look you know look good from every every angle and that's going to make rather boring writing people will uh identify with you especially in so far as you share the weaknesses that they perceive in themselves which then allow them to believe in your strengths when you do finally hit the right note you realized
I was thinking of that for years that's something I've I've I've thought about or I've felt for years but I didn't know how to get into it and I think my very best poem is just sort of like saying I was composing that in my mind you know for the last 10 years but I didn't recognize it as a poem uh because I
didn't take this part and this part and put them together Elizabeth Bishop says a poem is all sorts of things coming together suddenly I think that's very true you've written all the Parts you just haven't connected them it's like there's there'll be two chemical elements that are quite stable you put them together and they start to you know
to foam or heat or you know things like this and I think that's how poetry operates but Pros Pros is interesting because I think a lot of people today want to write you know with basically is uh very personal non-fiction you know not so much you know political history or uh or these impersonal kinds of you know fiction and
and so the questions that you're facing are very much the same as that you would as a poet which is how do you take personal material how do you take a personal tone how do you take the fabric of your life and uh make it into something that's more than just an anecdote and uh I don't know how you do that except through
compression and style well I think what a lot of people do if they don't feel like they have a style or a sense of voice is this how you see a lot of writers who end up living these crazy lives yeah but you seem to have lived a fairly healthy put together life I mean as much as you can at least relative to people who are
doing drugs and alcohol first of all it's a dangerous game to try to turn your life itself into a work of art and that never never interested me because the people I knew that did this were self-destructive I come from a family which is full of failure full of of people that ended badly uh who didn't achieve what they
wanted or ended up in jail or dead I have enough drama going on in my heart and mind without needing to borrow any from the outside world I'm you know uh I have uh you know tremendous uh swings of mood and and it'll be midnight and I'll realize everything I've ever written is worthless you know remember once you know my mid Thursday everything I'd
written on the floor because it was a failure it was a it was a uh uh it was a waste of my life but you know I got over it you've got to be in touch with with your your darker emotions I think to be a good writer but I've LED my life in a particular way which is why did I take a job in business well I needed a job because I
had no money I needed a good job because I had a family you know siblings and my parents that I needed to help support but I if I was making this fan bargain which is what it was um I had to be careful that I wasn't going to have the fan consequences my professors at Harvard they thought I was making a terrible mistake now if I told them I
was going to law school they would say well okay there's certain respectability but to go to business school is like saying you know I'm gon to I'm going to be the janitor and a bordello in that mind it was just an unacceptable thing and I said well I'm gonna don't worry I'm gonna still write and they would just they they just felt that that was a
complete delusion you would never write but I did that so that I could spend three or four hours every day reading and writing in a disciplined way and so I made this bargain that I would do this so that I could write now I would say that there's overwhelmingly long odds that I would fail because you know life
just takes you in different directions I mean if I was at all saying about a year into this I'd say this is the stupidest possible way I'm a young man I'm you know I got to you love with this girl that I marry we're in New York City you know why am I locking myself up in the basement every night I mean it's foolish but I understood I was working for
something else I mean what was it was it a dream was it a compulsion that you had to create was it a dream that you would become somebody someday was it some inspiration that you had and I said oh my goodness I want to fall that and feel what that's like what was the thing that was driving you it's all those things I
mean I think through most of your life what gives you meaning what gives you pleasure is your sense of yourself in the future you're working toward the future now you know I'm 74 if I spend too much time thinking about my future is I'm gonna get depressed you because it's you know it's finite but I'm still you know I'm still pretty I'm still you
know pretty positive actually I'm happier as an older man than I was as a young man I was very very temperamental and uh tempestuous as a young man but I had this intense moment in Vienna of my vocation and it came out of nowhere I did not not go there thinking I'd be a poet but I I realized that the life that
was going to be given to me was to be a poet that was the work that Destiny or God or the Muse it was not given by me it was given to me I didn't you almost surrendered to it yeah senica says if you follow your destiny it guides you if you resist it it drags you behind it and I think most people that are are aspiring writers run
the risk of having a a life of regret in which Destiny drags them behind it and I just know this that you know uh so many gifted people have unhappy or unfulfilled lives and they they compensate in a very sane and sensible way with other pleasures and things like this but there's a a sense of the unlived life yes I mean some people have
it for romance but I think most people you find somebody who's right for you eventually and you make a family and that's really good but it's not enough for somebody of of large appetites large Ambitions and so this was the bargain that I was making with with fate and so you know I did it and it took a price you don't get anything for free we were
talking earlier about the life that you're chosen to live and I want to give you this quote and here if you resonate with it and you're like yes that's me or no and if the answer is no I want to hear why no Gustav fler said you want to be regular and orderly in your life so that you can be violent and original in
your work absolutely it's absolutely and so what I that's you know it's perfect leaden for the you know the point I should have been making which is that what I did was I took myself out of the marketplace but let me back up a second now if you're a young writer and you with other young writers and they go
Dana what are you publishing and I go I'm not really publishing right now they assume that you're saying that everything you've written has been refused they go they feel sort of sorry for you so I had you know for six or seven years I had to uh you know to to to be pitiful in the eyes of my friends who were doing this that or the other
but I took myself out of the marketplace so I could discover who I was as a poet what did I sound like what did I want to write about and it I was very slow in getting at this why did I stop sending work out because I would send poems out and the ones they would accept were the ones that sounded like other poets and I
realized I wasn't strong enough to write to have a business career and to discover who I really was then when I began publishing I sent a bunch of poems and the Hudson review accepted I think seven and rather than wait to a year they just read the next issue with them then the editor of the New Yorker called me up and asked why I had not sent those
poems to him and I wouldn't give the New Yorker any poems because I was afraid people at my office read the New Yorker and I didn't have anybody that I worked with know that I was a poet I kept it entirely private but I went from not publishing at all to publishing in the best magazines in the United States how
did you know if you were improving because implicit what you're saying is an objective mirror that you can hold your own work which I think is rare well I don't think it's rare among really good writers H I think is rare among writers because you know they think everything I mean I get every day people send me poetry and that's fine it's good for
them but they're terrible usually these poems because they don't you know they they have the enthusiasm they have the subjectivity to creative but they don't have the objectivity to make it better but it's something you cultivate and I'm also a well-known critic and so part of of what a Critic does I think a poet
critic does is to bring the critical faculties to their own work but you you have to do it in a way which doesn't paralyze the work how do you do that schizophrenia so you're just able to switch between both modes you alternate between The Madness of invention it's like you know I write this thing and it's great then I look at it the next
morning I just see what's wrong with it then you throw yourself back into it you just forget all the critical things you just make it this that that then you see what's wrong and you just keep doing it by degree by degree by degree I have some poems that I've taken into 100 draft and you say well that's clearly
mad and I won't argue with you that's insane to take a poem that will make you no money and take it into 100 drafts except for the pleasure of getting it right of having uh describe that experience or convey that experience exactly as as well as you should and that I think also comes from the fact that you know I would come at night I'd
only have about 90 minutes to work and I would just burnish it and burnish it so I'll finish a poem and the same thing with Pros I just go through it and I'll say what's the worst line in this poem and I just cross it out where does the energy Peak where does it fall off and you start to see this shape of your work
and you you know you you're doing this and you build up to a kind of a climax and you pull back and you build another climax I do it all the time when I'm runting for the stage and then you come up and you say okay this is a dead patch cut it out now stage work you have the advantage of actually seeing it in rehearsal or something like that but you
have to do that you know for a Pros piece and so I'll look at a a longer Pros piece that I've written and I'll put it in kind of of shapes of experience so just you know just when you're getting to this one thing on then I'll pull the r rug out from underneath you and just keep you reading and that's why the interesting thing about this
book here is people say they've read it in one sitting you know it was a matter of getting the pacing and the balancing of it right and that makes me feel really good because that's what I intended was to create something that was so intriguing and entertaining to them that they didn't want to stop there
was something you said earlier about negative emotions and feeling these difficult emotions how have you cultivated that over the course of your career I didn't have to cultivate it the negative emotions came the dark Forces came what I had to do was control it maybe uh you know one of the reasons that poetry called me to it was that at
some uh deep level I'm all screwed up you know that I've got all these uh irreconcilable things going on on a side of my head and that what poetry becomes as a way of channeling that energy and to create something that is beautiful beauty is being able to see the form the shape underneath reality and to understand why it is right even when it
is destructive or terrifying or humiliating or whatever maritan said it is this it's the secret Shape of Things radiating into the intelligence and so the the most powerful kind of beauty I think is to be able to discover the secret shape and rightness of things that are terrifying I have very passionate impulses in me that uh need to be
channeled I wonder in some cases if the reason I write poetry was not because I had a religious vocation which I did not uh choose to follow you know I always wanted a family I I like girls I didn't want to become a priest but on the other hand I understand the beauty of a life that's dedicated uh to a cause larger than
yourself and so I have you know I have all these these impulses but you know uh and I'm very self-critical I feel my own failings passionately I mean I will not be able to Bear to watch this film because the only thing I'll notice is the mistakes I make which I'm sure are legion you know so I think that I've had to to balance those things in my life
and that's why it was very good for me during my uh younger and mo most tempestuous young adulthood to be anchored in a job that I had to go to every day when my son died you know I went through the you know with the funeral and it was right before Christmas so I was came back to California with my parents for a week
but then I went and I went to work every day I was dead inside but I went to work every day and the job saved me in some ways because I I uh it gave an order to me and then you know usually two or three nights a week or after work or on the weekend I would go over to the cemetery which was an old workingclass
Cemetery that was always messed up and dirty and I'd clean it up you find ways of channeling that energy and writing is one of them and reading is one of them to write a very small calm poem you know requires years of suffering and years of joy and everything you've suffered everything you experienced uh will not be wasted you
know if it creates the way of seeing the world that you know comes into your work what did experiencing the outer depths of grief how did that change your writing you know my wife and I lost our F first son he died at four months of sudden infant death Century he' never been sick a day in his life he was we had waited a long
time to have kids because we you know we felt well you know the kids are kind of a burden our lives are so busy but as soon as we had a child our life was suffused with joy I mean we realized we were just stupid to have delayed it that long so we had it then suddenly you know it was abruptly you know really about a week before
Christmas so it was terrible terrible uh you know thing um but when you're given a great grief uh what most people try to do is to repress it or deny it and I had worked with a couple of men who had lost sons and they were kind of old-fashioned American men so that they after you know the a little bit of you know period of
of mour they just repressed it what I saw them do was to in a sense shut off a a significant portion of their own Humanity to be able to cope with their their life and I understood why they were doing it but I didn't want that to happened so I made the decision that I would go wherever the grief led me and one of the places that led me was to the
graveyard I mean I'm a working class guy I me I'm not a you know I'm not a sophisticated uh you know person in that so I would and I would clean it up because it's all I could do you know we just gave me you know a little charm and I'm not going to sit and weep by the gravide but I I wanted to be in the you know God help me in the presence of my
so but then something strange began to happen I would see other people there and uh these uh they usually were older women and they would come over and they would say is this your boy and I'd say yes and I said you must have lost a child he goes yes and and that we would sit on the Tombstones and they would tell me about
the son or the daughter they lost and this happened a couple of times so here am I Stanford Harvard educated M uh MBA executive you know who's doing yard work talking to an old immigrant woman and we were equal we were equal in our grief uh we had both been uh drafted into excuse me I have a tear in my eye um you know into this club nobody wants
to get to join and nobody can leave and it taught me about the weight of our common humanity and then something would happen again and again I'd give a poetry reading and I would always read a poem about about my son and afterwards when people would come up there would always be somebody hanging back a little bit and
after a while I would just sort of say hi did you lose a child too and they always had I developed a sixth sense you know for this grief uh so it the experience taught me humility it taught me sympathy brought me you know back into the center of my humanity and those are good things I I wish I hadn't had to
pay the price that I did for that but it was good and my writing changed uh because you know I uh I simplified my writing my it's really funny my people say well what how has your writing changed I said well you know to a certain degree my writing has not changed a lot between my first book and my current books except in two senses my
work has become simpler and more emotionally direct and it's more Musical and so what I'm really saying is that I kind of knew what I should be doing there and I've gradually developed the ways of doing it and uh in a way that I think invites more people into the work so you know it was a uh an experience I do not recommend to anybody I hate to
say this but most people in the course of their life will have something absolutely appalling and calamitous happened to them and uh you know you've got to make a choice of how you deal with it and I don't think you you know uh you know you do it by denying it you just you you take that as part of what it means to be human
and have it lead into this and so uh another thing is it made me a better parent for my next two sons they're probably both a little bit spoiled when you talk about being more emotionally Direct in your writing since then what do you mean by that see if I can explain this my work became simpler more emotionally direct but some cases
more mysterious I realized I don't have to explain things I have to give you an experience and if I leave things that are kind of puzzling and mysterious to you uh that's not a problem people like that in poetry people want to have something that isn't a hum drum experience in a poem they want to participate if you think of when we say
the word mystery you could you could mean on one and puzzlement but it also can mean the secrets of existence I was thinking of wonderment yeah and so my work you know I mean I allowed that mystery to come in but I didn't curate it so narrowly as I did my you know in some of my my early work and I always knew this but you have to have
a tune even if you're writing free verse you have to have a tune the the shape of the words a poem is made up of great phrases of great sentences of great sounds of of sequences of emotions and these these things are all things that are independent of it saying well this is a poem which gives you you know a
response to this blah blah blah blah blah the intellectual content of a poem is real but it's not the major reason that we read poetry we're reading poetry to have a to have an intensity and authenticity of feeling should be visceral poetry I say it's visceral but plus a poem is a kind of holistic language and in the professions as we
learn to be lawyers or doctors or businessmen they teach us not to use holistic language you use very precise analytical language very you know precise if you're a psychologist inter personal you know language where you do these things but a poet just gives you raw language which is to say when I speak to you I speak to you as a person
who thinks who feels uh who has physical senses who has memory has in intuition and has imagination without asking you to divide those capacities let's say I'll talk to somebody and uh you know I'm this that and the other and I'll walk away and what do I think of that person why I really thought it through what I think
of that person I this that and the other you know M if I'm walking down the road a mile later I say well that guy's pretty funny stupid you you figure it out but you know what poetry is is that pre-analytical language it's it's all on the level of intuition and intuition is precisely what academic education tries to get you to get rid of your intuition
is probably smarter than your intellect frankly U because you can feel things and intu it things before you understand them in great poems you feel before you understand and I think that's the way you know uh you were a musician because you know when I playing you played most a lot of the stuff by memory or by you just you you
know the chords and you're playing it and somebody is taking the poem you know this song in a direction that you're not used playing but you're going along and suddenly you're learning this song is different than the song you thought you were going to play poetry like music is sound moving through time you know where print is like fixed and visual and if
you have a a a print age education you don't hear as well as you see well it's funny because whenever I read scripture I read the Old Testament Proverbs and the New Testament quietly but I always read the Psalms out loud yeah I find the Psalms read silently you just miss some f something fundamental about
their Essence they're trying to be songs well I think same the prophetic books you know I mean you know you read them and they have this cumulative impact when you're hearing them aloud you miss slightly on the page there's a reason why onethird of scripture is written as poetry because poetry Comm you know communicates differently so you have
you'll have a book that's just all the laws but now they're saying no I'm going to show you what's beyond reason I'm going to show you we're going to participate in the Divine yeah you don't need to read Leviticus out loud yeah exactly it's a checklist you know well they did I mean what is it there's the one one of the prophets who it was who
just sits the people of Israel down and reads them the entire Mosaic law for Days forget who it is you know uh Malachi or somebody like that but I mean you know the poor is you know uh you know Israelites are probably you know comos by the end of it you know so tell me this when you were teaching what were
the core lessons that you were trying to impart in your your students about the craft I had two things I was trying to teach my students one of them was practical one of them was artistic what I tried to do and I said I'm teaching this class because you in order to lead this the lives that you want uh need to
understand the power of language you need to be able to hear language and know what it means you know uh have to to hear language and know what it implies you have to hear language and know what is not being said and what is being said you have to develop your own power of articulation to be able to express what you know and what you want
and I would say how many of you are from immigrant homes I would say uh 30% of class maybe 40% of the class first generation to come to college about 40% how many of you speak a foreign language at home 30 40% not the same people because some people have you know very educated parents from a coreign country and so I said you know you are now in
English and you need to bring to understand all of the power that the of this language that we share in common so what I'm going to do is I'm going to work with you through poetry to uh increase your command of language and your ability for self-presentation everyone in my class had to memorize poems get in front of 215 people and
recite them they were terrified at first but by the end of into the class it became part of the class culture and the the most self-conscious shy person would come up I took them throughout the USC Community I would I would be invited to talk to the Board of Trustees I would walk in with three undergraduates and
everybody would stiffen up and I would have introduce each of them and have them reide a poem and the board loved it you know because they saw the fruits of of the humanities I would bring them to public events with me and things like this because I made them in a sense conf of speaking in public of being themselves and being articulate public
the same time I was giving them an introduction to an art form that is as old as any human activity and I wanted them to hear how people had shaped sound to capture and convey meaning you know I took like Robert Frost think that poetry is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget wow that's a heck of a qu
it is I mean a way of remembering so it's who's the mother of the muses nnos sign the goddess of memory a way of remembering what it would impoverish us so whatever you're remembering is valuable to forget and forget is is The Human Condition Oblivion most of what we're around us is going to be wiped out by Time by death by events and so you
have to in a sense create you know these uh Shakespeare calls Al for Oblivion and so I would teach them poetry as a musical memorable art of language they were responsible to know every word every image in the poem If it was a bird in the poem I wanted to know what kind of bird was it describe it and after a
while they they realized they would learn it I say because you're not just learning about language this language is a way of seeing the world that actually exists I made them work really really hard because I knew that if they did this if they memorized and they learned these things and they immersed themselves in it something would go on
inside of themselves and most of my class had a conversion experience there was always a few people that never had it at the back that were forlorn and sad but I would say 90 95% of the Class by the time we you know we were done had been converted to the notion that this was one of the vessels of human wisdom
in which they could participate and by learning it and by reading it by memorizing it they were Awakening themselves to their own sense of their own human capacity when you say learning it when I think of school in poetry honestly the word that I think of is boring and then I think of oh there's rhyme schemes and there's verse schemes
and whatever here's how it's constructed I mean I don't even know and then I mean I have a podcast called how I write and I don't even remember it that well but it seems like what you're saying is to learn it is something completely different from my experience yeah my pedagogy if you'll forgive that word has
nothing whatsoever to do with the way everybody else teaches it for thousands of years poetry was at the center of Education it was taught quite badly as a result everybody loved it and then about 1930s 1920s and 30s a group of brilliant Southerners called the new critics figured out the way to analyze poetry and they're absolutely right they
figured it out they saw how it worked and they created this critical school that lasted for half a century for the first time in history poetry was taught right and it killed the audience because it was a kind of a visual analysis of the dead silent page how was poetry taught before you memorized it you recited it you recited it in uh in
chorus you used it to teach history you used it to teach these various subjects and you didn't really teach poetry as a as a quintessentially literary art that had to be understood through literary analysis so my sense of teaching poetry is fairly simple students experience it they then perform it they memorize it and then once you've
done that you can do some analysis but analysis is very secondary to what poetry is if you made anybody who listened to a pop song that's exactly what I was thinking of analyze the chord uh sequences and the thing and basically the the uh the sounding of the chords no you got to be at the club and be like I
love this song then you figure out what's going on later and what's the proper response to a song it's to dance it's to tap your foot it's to sing along and I've seen this again and again if you take a bunch of kids and you allow them to bring all their performative energy into poetry they love it and in fact kids that are terrible English
students suddenly become the best people in the class I mean Tolstoy at one point they're asking him about you know is should novel you know deal you know with social issues and things like that he says no no it's it's not commensurate with those things what a novel does is to make you feel the joy of being alive in the world and so you know what art
does by igniting all of our human capacity it makes us understand that gee you know most of the day I'm not this alive most of the day I'm just kind of turning this part of me off and this part of me and so it excites it expands and it refines our complete human intelligence that is why very intellectual poetry is deadening because
it doesn't speak to us as a complete human being right uh and and so you know you've got to go back to this I think this Primal notion of civilization when there was an art uh that they called poetry or song but it was singing poetry and dancing all at once and so in dance even if people aren't singing there's
always the sense that people are about to break forth in song when people are singing they're moving their bodies the audience is moving their bodies and when people are writing you know writing a really good poem you should feel it physically Tiger Tiger Burning Bright in the forests of the night what immortal hand eye could frame thy fearful
symmetry as Blake would pronounced it uh and you got to you feel this which is the meter that you use for magic spells you know when you're writing in order to cultivate that do you stand do you walk do you kind of move your body or is it a pretty solitary still process and somehow you just I'm writing poetry I got to be
moving you got to be moving so do you walk around with a notebook or what I'll do is you know I'll sit at my desk here and I'll do something then I'll just walk this studio is designed so I can walk in a circle and I walk in a circle muttering like a madman and I just recite it until I and I'll just change it change then I'll feel the Lions get
right but you know how I'll know if the lines are right I'll feel it in my body it's not in my mind I don't hear an intellectual thing a that's right is I feel it it's intuition and its physical intelligence most of us most of the time go go through our life half awake the cultural technology of art used properly is to awaken us
to just experience and feel our situation how do you choose what you consume you're obviously so intentional about it not just with reading at books but with movies but with plays whatever it is how do you think about this is what I'm going to do next it's all impulse sometimes I plan to read certain books but in general
it's like all all I mean look look at the environment I create myself it's full of books you know and the sad thing about this I've read most of these books I've read all or part some of the books I've read many times and I've got images uh of paintings and and drawings and things that I think are beautiful um and
it there to sort of of keep me alive but these aren't the kinds of books that I would find in Barnes & Noble not for the most part um I've got about these are completely different I've got about I don't know four or five thousand books in this room and I've probably got about 20,000 books you know in my house and my you
know various places I mean but what is it what do you see as the unifying threat amongst these books what I have here is a uh a collection of poetry poetry criticism and literary writing I'll be writing something and it'll remind me of something then I'll go over and I'll read that and you know see what you know
is am I remembering it right then I'll go back and I'll work it again then I'll go back and and and read it and I'm playing off my memory and my experience do I waste time well yeah but sometimes you know by wasting time you come across something you didn't didn't you know intend the great danger is you know is the internet do have internet in here
yeah I do but I it's I turn it off most of the time I listen to you know YouTube while I'm shaving and things like that something I can't I can't read but I just try to dip into things that are that are good I mean every day I try to take something that's that's really intelligent and that I've read before or that I should have read and I just read
it and so I stopped writing pros this year because I have to go I have to get back to poetry there's a a book length poem that I started 10 years ago what I've done is really good but it just I haven't really written hardly anything for a couple of years and I've only got one Pros piece that I've agreed to write
which is on TS Elliott so I got these books of Elliot I just I just go and I'll read you know 20 pages of Elliot and it's just it's it's wonderful then I'll just put it down do you take notes as you do that so what's on the notes well this is I'm just you know's I'm just taking I'm reading this guy I'm reading Renee velic
this uh great Czech critic on thing about about uh him talking about uh types of criticism going through and then I go to you know to Elliot and Dev Valerie you know so I just I'm just you know going through and I'm just uh I be got to think about the types of critics now this has nothing that U that is directly translatable into the little piece that
I've agreed to write on Elliott but it puts me in a a kind of uh of frame of mind and thinking about you know why do people write criticism you know why do we read criticism you know with you know and and what'll happen is that I'll do this and I'll think about these things and then suddenly I'll get an entry into
the thing I want to write about from an angle I hadn't thought about I think one thing that a good writer needs and this is just the opposite of most of the people you talk to because they give you very good advice what you want to write sit down and write if you want to write be patient I would say think about things I mean Wallace Stevens you know
he said people talk about writing they never really talk about the meditation that precedes writing I'm very big on this you know because I can sit if I have to write a piece I can sit down and write a piece but if I want to write a piece that really surprises me it's involuntary it happens because I put myself in a space where these kind
of things happen you know I don't date with The Muse you know via a you know a dating site you I just go to places The Muse might hang around and if she shows up you know it'll be great if not I'll she'll show up eventually but you know patience and fortitude you know I think are two old fashion words I think are
important I have this sheet of paper which is the first thing I see when I come into my studio it's a little thing in Latin nula Diaz C Renea which was said by Piney the Elder well this means it's not a day without writing a line you know a line is not much to write a sentence is not much to write but you know if you can write a
good sentence then you'll write another good sentence after it you write a good line and it'll it'll either now or future will sort of cultivate so in a month how many days out of that month do you write a line I try to write every day something and if not I feel guilty when it happens it happens and you can't
stop it I mean then I'll just you know just be every day around the clock I'll be work I'll be working on it because it'll it'll come you know so U and I I like that it's kind of a Mania but I think to have a really good Mania you have to have that the meditation so what I do is I can't write a poem but I um revise the lyrics of one
of the songs for the operas that I'm writing about something I'm working I do a lot of work with composers and that's very good because they have their deadlines and things like that and so I'll be revising something or this that or the other now it's not the big project that I want to be working on but it it keeps me in touch with these
things or I'll get they'll send me something and I'll revise it or whatever so every day I'm doing writing and but usually there's a big project or two big projects that I want to work on I think there's a certain practicality of delaying of pushing it aside and pushing it aside until you can no longer
prevent it you know the meaning of it is too strong the you know the inspiration and then you can't do anything but right and it breaks and that sounds sounds very counterproductive it sounds like a way of of of uh making excuses for not writing but I think the inspiration should be overpowering so tell me this we talked earlier about how
you've how you went about deliberately improving your poetry how have you done the same thing with Pros how is the process of improvement and deconstruction different I divide my Pros into two pieces you know I mean I wrote at least a million words in these textbooks where I'd write a biography and I'd make sure that if I had an
author's biography would be two pages that it was interesting people said God these biographies are interesting because it wasn't just born so and so I'd say gasant uh was born in a rented Castle in Normandy I mean I have you know just the first sentence would you know would you know would get you this is writing where it's it's kind of a I
know where it's going you know I know it's going to end up where K deant dies and critics say this about his work and U I got a book review here I know it's gonna the review is going to be 1,00 words because that's what the Wall Street Journal is asking me for or it's going to be 2,000 words and I know the I know the books that are about this that
and the other but then there's the kind of writing where I don't know where it's going to end I know what it's going to be about I know what think and I let it go and I get into it and then I sort of say I see where I'm going but I don't feel anything in this paragraph so I'll take the same ideas and I'll I'll rework it
and sometimes I'll just change this sentence the next day I'll change that sentence and this sentence but then a week later suddenly this paragraph is is full of emotion is it's got these little image or two that that triggers other things if you ask me what I call it I call it layer ing in my poetry I began doing something that I I
now which is you know the playw writes do I have a text and I have a subtext there's certain things that I don't put in the poem that I want you to feel and I realize that there a an essay should have a certain subtext too so you're doing certain things um that evoke a lot of other stuff that you're not really getting into but part of it is just
making it as interesting as possible I wrote an essay about a a a little known poet and it was a very good essay but I looked at the thing and I saidou know why would anybody want to read this when they don't know the work and I so I put a few more quotations in it worked a little bit better but it still so then I just
realized I needed to describe the guy so I wrote two paragraphs that are just uh evoke this weird guy uh in a way that's both touching and funny how when you're thinking about describing him and you have that challenge how do you describe somebody well people will say well so and so and they'll describe him this that and the
other and pull from this no I think it's always a mistake to describe people that way you should take a particular situation and recreate that person in that one moment of time as a little story as a little uh piece of drama and everything you want to do you know uh will happen so I said this guy that you know you know that anybody
who had gone to poetry readings in New York at the end of the 20th century would have seen Samuel Manos whether they knew him or not you know a tall U uh you know man always sitting at at at the in the you know standing in the corner of the room uh with with beautiful hebraic looks he could have been played a prophet uh or a magician
in a silent film um and when you addressed him he spoke one octave lower than anyone else in the room I'm at the beginning of my New York Life I I don't know that people but I know who he is so I come up to him when I Samuel how are you to which he responds how am I I am a pariah he seemed you know both uh depressed and delighted by his situation
so I just evoke this strange guy that has chosen his whole identity to be an outsider to be a pariah and so you do this I just create a little narrative it's two paragraphs long it's very funny and it's very touching and then suddenly you go I go into the thing about this neglected poet and you have a sense of a
real man in a real situation who is standing in the corner because he's literally painted himself into a corner in New York literary life and what do most people get wrong when they try to describe I'm sure that they can there's a things that most people get wrong but fundamentally when you're reading something and the description just Falls
flat almost everything that you do should tell a story I don't mean like a complicated part of a story but you should begin in a real place and go to a real place if I write a poem that's just images there should be a story implicit in those images so when you're describing a person people will often say well so and so did this and they
take all these details from different times and places and make an abstract portrait of that person if you're going to do it in words the words have got to move in a narrative way and so I think that what you do is you you you create a scene in which that person is at the center you know otherwise I think it's
it's just a list of details and I've SE I I can't tell you how often when I'm reading a novel they'll describe the character and and doesn't mean anything to me after after a while but you know if they can if they can show how the person moves with their body and depict the size of the body and something and it doesn't have to be elaborate it just
has to be beginning middle end can be three sentences right so uh I tried to keep myself out of my Pros in the early days I tried to make it abstract very reasonable very rational very intellectual and it was very successful it was very good academic Pros it was very good journalistic Pros because you know the old-fashioned journalist you
know kept himself or herself out of the story uh you know there but the older I got the more I understood that first of all uh if you put yourself not at the center of a story but on the edge of a story of an edge of argument the person can come with you they know then where to position themselves and then
secondly sometimes things that you know uh can best be expressed by by telling your personal anecdote by telling a story with your in it so that uh they learn whatever it is or hear whatever it is happen the way it happened to you break that down for me you know I was the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts for six
and a half years and you know I can tell you a story of one day in Pittsburgh at a national Arts conference I had to give each hour a speech to a different art form so I came in at 8 am into the chorus America uh you know uh meeting and addressed it and they're all singing and they're all friends because they're all
part of choruses and they sing in harmony and they sing in things and they say let's all sing God you know America the Beautiful and they sing it they're full of joy and everything else then I go to to uh the league of American symphony orchestras and there's room full of all these tables and each table is the board of a different Symphony and
there's the board chairman and you could be among Bankers you know because they've got big halls and they got to fill 3,000 seats for every a you know and they've got to get subscription so you know it's like a banking uh sort of thing and you go through you know through this you know you know Point by point to all these different uh
different groups and you can convey these things as a narrative as it happened to you in my case literally all in one day if you can create a story people like to come along with it and it's a very uh easy way of making complicated points which is to say in this Cas is that every art form has a remarkably different personality that's
reflected in the artists and in the organizations themselves did you break down other people's Pros in the way that you did for poetry when I really started to try to improve my work I went to the people I thought were the best to see how they operated on a sentence by sentence paragraph by paragraph so you
went to them as and you picked up their work or you went to go speak to them no these are for the most part dead people I've never met I've never met George Orwell I've never met Randall there's certain people I think are really good Randall Jerel okay great Pros writer of fellow who died uh more recently I never met him I we I exchanged a couple
letters Clive James okay who most people know from television because he uh uh hosted a show on the great cities of the world for BBC but I know him as a poetry critic uh and he's just terrific I mean he just and I just looked you know the way like what Clive James did he was an Australian who came to the to England
and conquered you know he everything he did he did really well uh and he had this ability to create a paragraph and he would just have this knockout sentence and it would just you know like just uh rivet you and it kind of put everything else in you know Jerel kind of Randall Jerel uh would sort of weave himself in and out of it Orwell you know
it's like a a the a tonic note that he had that he would go around you know like this and there's a real sense of controlling his voice his tone his idiom I mean it's an amazing amount of control uh highly moralistic but never boring so is you're reading somebody like Orwell you admire him is that a process of just
reading more of his books is that a copy work I'm going to copy his sentences well at some time you got to sit down and you just got to look at a paragraph that you think is a great paragraph and figure out why the hell you think it's a great paragraph and I'll tell you what I learned again and again and again you
see something this is just tremendous and you got like a thousand ideas coming from this paragraph then you go back and look at it it's much simpler it's much shorter than you remember same thing with poems you'll have a poem and you'll remember all these things and that's uh when you learn something about writing which is you put this much but once
again you leave things out you have radiant details you have these things and it suddenly it you know creates all kinds of of associations and uh Reflections that it's this battery and when you link into it you know it electrifies your Consciousness and that's the thing that I really I like about Orwell I like about Jerel Clive James does it Ain does
it Elliot does it a different way Elliot is very Sly and intellectual and stuff comes in sideways but you know there's DH Lawrence I mean when he's not crazy he's magnificent sometimes he's both at once what I urge people to do is is you got to read you can't be a writer unless you read you can't be a writer unless
you read a lot and you've got to have uh make judgments and you say well who are the people you think are really the best and then you don't have to write a book about them just say well you know what do I like about them and find a paragraph find a page and just look at what they do and you'll be surprised at what they do it's it's
always going to be a little different from what you remember and you'll probably be astounded at how Compact and how simple it is once you analyze it there's another writer I love somewhat forgotten him sirel Connelly the way this book begins is you wonderful this is a book about why he never wrote a great
book and it's called the unquiet grave and it go it be this the first end the more books we read the sooner we perceive that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task has any consequence obvious though this should be how few writers will admit it or having made the admission will be prepared to lay aside
the piece of iridescent mediocrity on which they have embarked I love the iridescent mediocrity you know he's saying that the only thing you can do is write a masterpiece or nothing else is of any consequence and uh if you're a writer and you do this you should just abandon what you've written on his first
book called enemies of Promise which each chapter shows you a different way that you'll go wrong as a writer oh that's cool and it's like no matter what you do you know you're gonna it's you're gonna end up uh unsuccessful that's great if you were given that prompt what are three chapters that you would write for ways that people go
wrong as writers they get a job at the University they live as a freelance where they've got to crank out things uh every every week and thirdly they just decide they're going to write uh a kind of of quick and easy book to get an advance because the next book they write will be a masterpiece and I think that each of those things is a trap you've
got to find a way of distancing yourself from the short shortterm Market uh to make your you're writing a long-term investment there's a a young woman I know right now that's going through exactly this dilemma and she asked my advice she's written a lot of a lot of pieces but it she wrote finally wrote like a big piece a big article and it
just got a lot of attention so you know an editor from a major house called up and wants to do it as a book and you can say well yeah because you you know you got a big publisher and you know exactly the book it is you want to write and he's going to get you know give you an advance or you can say no because you're
not ready for a book yet this article is probably perfect in itself if you try to turn it into a book it's going to become a typical non-fiction book most of the books that I read have a wonderful first chapter a kind of mediocre second chapter then it's just padding yeah well this is major question then how do you know that
you're ready for a book you don't everything is a is a venture everything is gamble let me take the story of my first book because this is how how bad my advice is for people this one publisher come up to me said I like your work uh would you give me a book and I said no yeah I'm not ready for a book then about a year later another
publisher came up to me and asked for no no no uh I had done a book with this little press there's only two people then called grey wolf press it's now a major you know a major kind of literary press but then it was just two people and he wanted the book and I said well not ready but I'll when I get it done I'll send it to you I uh sent it
off to a literary contest which is the only contest I've ever entered and I knew I wouldn't win and I knew who would win and then uh I sent it to Greywolf and he wanted it but I'd also sent it to uh Alfred kof which is probably arguably the best place for a new poet to to appear grey wolf said I they wanted it but the next
day kop called me up and they wanted to publish it and I knew that the reason that the kop editor wanted to publish it was that I had just published a a piece in the New Yorker that was very celebrated and I you know I figured that she probably hadn't even read it she just oh he's a hot writer so I told alord kop I did not want my book to come
out with them and I went with this two person operation called grey wolf press now nobody would tell me that you know uh would no rational person would say that was the the thing to do this guy who was really quite his name was Scott Walker who founded GRE was quite different from me in a lot of ways but I
really in respected his integrity and I said that's the kind of guy that you know I can work with it's now um 42 years later I'm still with Greywolf how about that every one of my books with Greywolf well every one of my poetry books is still in print the kop I probably would have gotten a little bit more initial sales on but my book would
have been out of print two years later and so uh I did it uh out of in intuition maybe a little bit out of uh uh stubbornness and and disapproval of of this but you know you know it was the right decision to make much of my of my career about has been about saying no to things right I was offered the Poetry editorship in the New
Yorker I said no I don't think I want to do that not because I didn't think it was a great job I didn't think it was an interesting magazine I couldn't have done a lot of good but I felt that the job would have owned me versus that in the same way when I went to became chair chairman of the national end for the
Arts I just said I will have to stop writing for six years you know which is a great sacrifice for me you know uh and you know my writing was official writing I knew that was the price that I would have to do now I probably could have written a lot of crappy stuff and everybody would published of everything you know because that but I just said
that I had to separate my public career from my literary career so if I came to you and I said D thinking of writing my my very first book and then we begin to have a conversation about is it the time to do that how do you counsel me or any young writer on thinking about this well you know the thing is I would say well
what's your what is your book tell me about the book you want to write have you done like any portions of it and and look at it because you only get one debut your first book will get a certain kind of attention because it is a first book you're a new voice coming onto the marketplace and so the question is do you want to squander that or do you want
to maximize that you know I don't think you should wait till you're 85 to publish your first book but I think you you should be deliberate about that and come into the world you know like emerge like manura from this you know the the skull of Jupiter fully armed um but I think part of it is is just talking with
somebody and what is the book and this that and the other and see what happens then too is that a lot of times people you'll have an article that you're turning into a book and then you're just cranking it out the previous chapters and uh there's a person I know who did a what ended up being a very successful book and and the person was very I don't
even want to give the gender of the person away was very excited about it and sent me this and this is a person I kind of had mentored a little bit and I just said this is just badly written and so I went over and I took about the first 30 pages and I just was merciless about it and to the person's credit they
then rewrote it and I said now you got to do the whole manuscript and I said you I I do the manuscript and uh do 200 changes they called back triumphantly a couple of you know days later and they spent all the time in 200 changes said print it out again now go through and do another 200 changes you know they said why can't I
this I said do it and they did it uh and the book got better and better but they their editor saying you don't need anymore it's perfectly ready to go they want to get it out my editor's yelling at me I said don't listen to your editor you know your editor just wants you know it's like if you you know you do a favor
for somebody as soon as you do it you know they need the next favor you know so and they did it the book got good the book was very was uh very successful that being said I think it could have you know it could have gone through another round of changes too but the book was not ready to be published but the commercial aspect of this of making
that person had to have this by this state the copy editor in this date so I think what I would say is you know what is the book you want to write talk about it you have you brought the thing to where it should be at book length which means that chapter two chapter three chapter four something different has got
to happen than what's in chapter one and uh most people they start going through that say you know I better wait or I better do a little bit more work or I better you know uh do it because what the agent wants to do is to sign the deal and the contract to get their commission what the editor wants to do is okay they signed you and they got to
get you in the system on these dates and put you through so their interests their legitimate interests I don't criticize them for wanting those things but that's not the same as your interest in producing the best book possible so you've got to be as we your own your own editor your own agent in terms of marshalling your talent you seem to have
such an interest in the art of revision and looking at work and progress it seems to just be something that you love and you've said basically that's where the work happens it is in the revision where it happens but you've really looked at people revising and editing and studied what have you learned any real writer has to go to
revision uh with the same openness to experience that they bring to creating the first draft you know revision is a creative activity and you see again and again things which don't work in their first draft becoming magnificent in their final draft because the material has been reconsidered and reconsidered so I love
revision uh and I've also seen how powerful it is in terms of making something work my sense is that you ask your peers a lot for editing feedback is that true and if so how do you ask for that feedback yes I do at the beginning of my career was always very dependent on one or two people for their feedback now if you remember what I said
for almost seven years I worked in isolation I would go to the office during the day you know I would come back and write at night you know I had my my life with my wife but I you know I was not leading a liter lary life in the conventional social sense and so what I would do is I would send my poems U to usually at any given moment one or two
people and just ask them tell me what's wrong with it what do you think of this if they said oh that's wonderful that was not help I like the people that Circle things I like this line this that and the other over the course of my whole career there's been about half a dozen people that are like this not all
at the same time I mean and that's very very important to me the problem is you get to a point like where I am now and I send it to somebody they go it's terrific don't change a word and no I said no no tell me the words I should change but during those early stages it was all important and they were for the most part my fellow poets and what do
you look for in good collaborators I look for cander I want you know the hard part of writing a poem because think about this you know Pros you're making a kind of public argument in a public idiom but in poetry you're trying to evoke things you're trying to imply things you're trying to enchant with the music and so you know
you send it to somebody and just say you know just see if they feel the Enchantment Where does the poem go wrong at that stage of my writing career I assure you in every one of my poems something went wrong and if you have two people and they both say this line is a stinker or they say what do you mean by
this or whatever um you know you learn revise around it a lot of times they'll say they don't get this line so the Temptation is to cut the line out no it's you change the context so that line becomes more powerful but yes a young writer uh should find other writers more or less on the same level whose intelligence and whose honesty you
respect and exchange manuscripts and you need to give them all your intelligence and cander and Imagination so that you you know you have an honest transaction with them and what I've seen is when you're doing this both of you will get better feedback is a heck of a way to improve giving other people
feedback yeah one thing I noticed when I read about literary history very rarely do does a single poet just emerge out of nowhere little groups of poets friendships of poets find someone who has a catalytic effect on you and you know you'll make both of you your your writing better and so I really sought very consciously to create
a community to which I could belong at first it was just a couple of people but when I got into the to the full swing of my career I mean I created a whole Community uh at Westchester for this this annual conference on forum and narrative which ended up being the largest poetry conference in the United States and we did that without budget
without staff or anything else because we we had the right idea and we created the right uh frame of it nowadays I've got this conference on the Catholic literary imagination we had 1300 people and so you create a community and if you create a healthy Community writers are looking for that sometimes you'll copy the work that
you've already done to get into the state in order to start writing yeah why do you do that when I um was working in business you know you know late at night about 9:00 I would come you down to this table and I had you know an hour 90 minutes to write and the question is at that point all I really wanted to do was veg out I wanted to open up another beer
I wanted to watch TV I wanted to do the the normal things that normal people do but I had made the abnormal decision to be a poet while having a job that was a 10-hour a day job job and so I had to find a way of getting from this world to that world and the way I did it was that I would take I was writing Pros I would
take the paragraph that I had written the night before and I'd recopy it and as I recopied it I'd say well you know this word could be a little diff I begin to revise it and by the time that I finished recopying that paragraph which might be 20 minutes I suddenly was like back in the inspiration and I picked up
the continuity and then I would write again and so what it was for me was a way of reentering my inspiration re-entering my frame of thought my argument my my emotional tone at that point which I think if IID said well that's done I'm going to write from scratch I think it would have been more difficult and the same thing when I was uh you know
writing a poem I would just recopy what I had up to that point and as I recopied it I start to hear it again I might play with a couple of words you know and then by the time I was down to where I had to write something new I was I was in the poem I had this swing of the music and everything so you know so anyway that it
worked for me so I could do night after night after night because otherwise you know you you would just stare at the empty page and feel despair you said you stopped after 90 minutes did you follow a Hemingway stop mids sentence or how do you think about ending your right would I wasn't like the thing with I look at the clock and it's you know quarter 11 I
got to I'm going to get up you know uh you know early next morning because if you if you really are writing well and you go to bed you're sitting there still writing in your head you had to just cut it off when you you know when it was when you just sort of said okay it's about time it's about time to end and
not feel that was a defeat see part of what you're trying to do uh as a writer and this it doesn't matter if you have a job or not is to manage your mood swings because you know writers tend to be moody people and if they aren't already people with normal emotional swings the task of writing and looking at your stuff and sinking into this thing uh
will accentuate and aggravate your mood swings you got to find some mechanism for doing this and not everybody has the maybe the same things but it's the same problem that you're dealing with I want to tell you about the only app that I use to read articles and it's called read so tell me if this sounds familiar you
read something brilliant like an amazing quote the perfect article but then one day you go back you're looking to find it and it's just gone you can't find the thing that used to drive me crazy but then I found this app called reader and it's become the backup system for my brain here's how it works so whenever I'm on my phone I'm on my computer I'll
come across a new article and what I do is I just toss it into reader and then whenever I'm ready to read I can find all the articles pre-downloaded with no ads and no clutter but here's the kicker every time I highlight something reader automatically saves it for me so then if I'm writing and I need that perfect
quote that perfect example it's just right there waiting for me and because that I don't have to dig through old notes or endless browser tabs anymore and that means that I can focus on writing reader is the sponsor of today's episode and look I got to love a product in order to promote it and I can tell you that I use reader every single day
so this what I did I called up the CEO and I said yo will you give how I write listeners 60 days free and he said sure they got a sign up though at readwise doio David Perell and there's a link in the description below all right back to the episode yeah I'd like to show you how one of my poems begin it's a relatively
simple poem one night after midnight I came to my house and there was a gig gigantic moth across my door now this is a moth I see about once every two years it's a kind of Luna Moth it's as big as my hand and it has a protective coloration so in their wings are things that look like two owl eyes so Predator coming down on it would be frighten and
would go away I was moved by just the beauty of it the fragility of it and the fact that I see it only a few times and it's always late at night when no one else is around on a on a foggy even and so I began to write a a a poem so I I jotted down you know seven lines only the first two words appear in the final poem which is pardon me and
and so U then uh this is November 13th a week later I I finally had a moment's piece and I begin to write this and you know and it goes pardon me moth I had to learn your name because one of the things that that struck me is I I couldn't remember the technical name of the moth but I'd seen it before and so I
was like stumbling on somebody whose name you didn't remember so I have this conversation with moth it's still I mean it's you can just tell it's just disorganized it's its lines and I went through 10 pages is this all in the same night well uh this the first three pages are the next day then the following day
I uh I write another page I start to get the tune of the poem and I realized that it is uh going to rhyme here's what the the opening of the final poem sounds like pardon me Pilgrim I forgot your name when you arrived last night at our front door a banful vagrant from the stormy skies your broad Wings marked with two ferocious eyes but your Fierce
gaze gaze proved Beauty in disguise a Dusty sweetness under fictive eyes giant of your fragile race you came by Gusty happen stance and nothing more yet still I wondered what had brought you here so late when I too wandered aimlessly but mute with wonder how could I inquire the secrets of your lunar Embassy so it's you know I'm it's just a
a moment of kind of Wonder at night when I I see the beauty of something and I realize it's big but it's fragile and it reminds me of myself in a way so I go through you know all these things that I'm trying to do and I'm working with the rhyme scheme but what's interesting is you only realized that around draft
four that you're going to do a rhyme scheme did I hear you right I knew that I had a kind of thing so what I try to do is I try to write the language and I ask myself and this sounds odd people think that you impose a form which you don't I write the language and I say what does this poem want to sound like
what do the words that are coming to me want to sound like so I go through these you know 10 of these you know handwritten drafts and then I gradually say okay I kind of know what the poem sounds like and looks like now two months later I take it and I do the I bring it to the computer and that's a very big moment and I think people cheat
themselves that don't do this because sudden as soon as you put it on the computer you go wow this looks and sounds differently from what I thought it was and it gives you this moment of objectivity and so then I begin doing it and and then it happens fairly rapidly within the next week you know I take it through another you know 10 drafts and I
keep playing with the rhyme scheme uh and then gradually uh you know a week later I have what is almost this finished poem I'm calling it apology to a luna moth because I you know it's a luna moth terrible title uh because the poem is is it is an apology I'm talking to an animal uh which can't talk back but and
so it's a kind of fictive as they say conversation terrible title and usually a good it's often good to begin a poem with a version of its first line so it becomes pardon me Pilgrim and so pardon me Pilgrim is a pretty odd way to begin a poem when you're talking to an insect but it set the title does it then you hear it again
in the first line so the idea that this mysterious nocturnal animal is a pilgrim becomes established by then pretty much every word every line is rhymed I've got some lines rhymed four times it's a very very intensely rhymed poem you know and it's finished and so pardon me Pilgrim to a luna moth when you're trying to do the rhyme scheme I'm imagining you
sitting next to a thesaurus is that something that you do or is your bank of language large enough that you don't really need to do that I occasionally use a thesaurus what I do is I you know I say the lines aloud and so I I I I like the music of this me you which is like a baneful vagrant from the stormy dis Skies your broad Wings marked with
two ferocious eyes but your Fierce gaze proved Beauty in disguise a Dusty sweetness under fictive eyes I mean it's the same rhyme four times in a row and I like you know the the effect of that you know I like the fact that you're lost in the Rhymes because it's a kind of a lyric moment it's you know 12:30 at
night in the fog outside and I'm staring at a moth when that happens when you're transfixed by a moment in your own life that's what art is all about no one in my family has ever seen this moth but me I've lived here 30 years and I've probably seen it nine or ten times you know I felt I was given this momentary
Vision the next morning it was gone that's the relationship with the world that I I treasure you know when uh there's certain beauties that I see every day the Sunset up here is beautiful the sunrise is beautiful the fog comes in in the morning these are predictable Beauties but every now and then something transfixing happens just for a moment
and uh you know I feel as if the world has revealed one of its secrets to me and I'm grateful if I have any advice at all to talk to uh to people that want to be real writers I would say the thing you should try to do in your writing is to be grateful for being alive just to be suffused with gratitude at what is given you and instead I see a culture
which is angry entitled envious I don't think these are for the most part emotions uh which develop into powerful and meaningful art there's a real theme over the time we spent together of seeing the miraculous and the mundane and being you're really in tune with where you live and The rhythms and the seasons and the animals and just looking
a little bit deeper than most people would everything I'm saying for most writers will be bad advice but for me my experience of my daily life almost always in the country but even in the city is metaphysical which is to say I experience Two Worlds at once I experience the world in front of me of the immediate senses but I almost always
have a sense of something underneath that there's so much of reality which is invisible that's not just because I'm religious I mean because it is a fundamental uh belief for anyone who's religious that there's the temporal the eternal the physical the spiritual but I think it's a kind of an alertness after having lost my
son I realize something that you don't realize as a child you don't realize as an adolescent you don't realize as a young adult which is most people go through life bearing terrible Sorrows terrible losses and to everyone's credit they get on with it they get on with their lives but there's always these things just underneath the surface and
every now and then they break through I had these this weird experience that happened so many times after my son was lost people that I'd known for years that I'd worked with for years would uh come into my office and they would begin by saying I'm so sorry to hear what happened and then they would tell their
own story America does not want to hear people's SOB stories I mean I I know that certain political people you know make a ritual of this but in individual and social reactions you know we uh for very good reasons you know we maintain our calm we get on with our lives but for these people it created these strange moments of
intimacy uh with other people in which they talked about things that they could not have shared with me under normal circum circumstances and so uh and I've learned that I'll be in a group and I'll look around people and I'll be able to see people who are innocent wor survivors survivors of the tragedies or the hardships of their own life and
there is something sad about that but there's also something very Noble about that so anyway I think that my attitude towards life is uh to to not only enjoy and be uh appreciative of what is visible but to be conscious of those things which I can only Intuit it underneath the surface that's a good answer you talk about
people walking into your office and what did the business World teach you about about writing and how that kind of writing is different from the Poetry that you aspired to well you know when I tell writers or they ask me about the fact that you know you spent 15 years in the corporate world and you you're working you know uh 10 hours a day
you're traveling all the time that must have been terrible and I in retrospect realize it was very good for me to be with non-literary people people who really didn't uh care about any of the things I studied they were smart but they were not intellectual I spent 15 years talking to people and listening to how they spoke listening to how they
told stories uh seeing what they found interesting what they didn't and it gave me a really good sense of the American language in the American character I think that that was much better for my poetry than if I had spent those 15 years uh at an ivy league university you know teaching excellent students about the
you know the latest trends in literary study it made my work more direct more grounded and more democr rtic when I write in Ry and meter I'm actually being Democratic because it's it uh the average person knows how to hear a poem that is metrical I mean I I guess I'm educated enough to do these podcasts and
I think of poems as being Rhymes and and meter and I don't really know how else to read a poem when I think of a poem I think of rhyme schemes that's a Prejudice that you share with the great mass of humanity yeah well you know I wrote a poem that became controversial and it's you know called cruising with the Beach Boys and it's just about being
in a car hearing an old beach boy song and thinking about when I first heard it it was immediately popular but it was immediately attacked you know for all these reasons but I think the reason it was attacked by so many people is that it just bothered them that I was writing this poem and rhyme about popular music
but uh What uh person in my generation was not not partially formed by listening to AM radio by listening to the rock music of the 60s it would be ridiculous for me not to write about that and it seems to be the most natural thing to write about songs that rhyme and have a beat with words that rhyme and have a beat well that's what's great
about rap music is you can hear it if you're out somewhere or somebody drives up next to you turn on the radio and all of a sudden you can start bobbing your head tapping your feet to the Rhythm of the music and it's you were saying this earlier it's pre-int tellectual it just hits your soul it hits your body and
you're like I like this and a lot of the Poetry that I read which isn't much because I don't really like it that feels more academic I don't feel that at all I actually feel nothing my the only thing that gets activated is my brain well that's because I think for the most part poetry should be heard and not read silently when you read silently after
you've heard it you know a way of refreshing the musical memory when I was at Harvard which was a wonderful School brilliant professors there you know I was being taught uh three or four assumptions about poetry one is that poetry had now become so uh difficult and and Innovative because of modernism that it could never go back it would
only become more and more complicated in the future and only smart trained Elite people like you and me could understand it we were part of this intellectual Marine Corp that was tough enough to read poetry secondly that the average person would never go back to reading poetry it was gone it was Democratic
thirdly that it was now impossible ever to use rhyme and meter in serious poetry again because uh the organic forms of late modernism were the directions to go and then the fourth one was really quite interesting and this was honestly Dogma that the uh African-American writers would never use rhyme and meter again
because it was European and they had been liberated from you know the the uh the manacles of this European art form now 10 years later you know you got cool herk uh in South bronos and nobody told him he's not supposed to use Ryman meter he invents as it were or he first publicizes hipop and rap within 10 years is the most popular form of recorded
sound everywhere in the world and so you know what it just shows you is the people who are the experts are terrible about predicting the future you know I was born at the height of print culture what I mean by print culture is a society in which all important information is published in print it's preserved in print and it's
organized you know to be able to be found in in print encyclopedias dictionaries uh reference works as well as just all of the books and magazines and that was to me culture so it was book culture it was magazine culture and I uh as a writer worked in that but what was already happening was the technology that was being invented uh was making us
realize that what we thought was reality was actually a very historically bound era went between not even Gutenberg but the the beginning in the 18th century of mechanical Printing and the end of the 20th century and suddenly longdistance phone rates becoming affordable people don't write letters so much anymore
right you know having uh radio stations that were not just three radio stations but a 100 radio stations then suddenly you have this thing quit called the internet uh which is first just print but then suddenly uh you know you you have a thing where an average person can afford a camera can afford recording equipment soon has a a little cell phone
in which they can uh talk to people record things post things uh on all of these sites and by the beginning of the 21st century print culture is over as a poet you know I'm this guy of print culture how do most people come to my work in poetry readings in broadcasts in TV shows where I'm actually operating the same way that Homer did 3,000 years
ago you know where he's giving poetry before there's even writing and so I saw that happening U and the books are not going to go away but what a book is for is going to be very different I find myself now in uh you know in in the beginning of my old age uh in a culture where as a writer uh the the technology
that I perfected which is how to make a printed page sing is a slightly U Antiquated even archaic uh you know kind of uh of Technology now luckily one of my sons was a filmmaker and so he began to say look you know uh dad you actually are best off when you're lecturing your poetry is most powerful and it's read
aloud so I began not because I wanted to but because I had a son who dragged me he began filming me reciting poems whenever he got new equipment he would just film me to see how things work and he would try editing things he began to say you know these lectures that you gave are really interesting can we film some of those and we bring them in uh to
the new medium but I said well I don't really want to just be a talking head let's integrate visuals into it integrate these other things and so I now have uh significant at Presence on YouTube uh doing work which I would like to say is uh very good looked at from the old perspective and very good looked at from the New Perspective and so I'm
lucky enough because I have got a son uh you who specializes in these things to be able in a sense to speak to the younger generation now for writers who do want to thrive in the digital culture how should they be thinking about the strategy of their work differently well I think that anybody Who Wants To Be A a serious writer now
has to be polymathic you know if you go back to the Renaissance you go look at Michelangelo you know he did architecture he did sculpture he did paintings he you know he developed machines and I think that's how we need to be to date a 21st century writer has to be a renaissance man or woman and which means you have to be able to write
for the page write for broadcast and be able to embody your work you know as a speaker of your work as a performer of your work your generation has a name for this multiple platforms but if you have multiple platforms that are unrelated to each other you know you don't acquire a brand you don't acquire an identity well
earlier when you asked about what a a writer should do I says the first thing you need to do is to look into yourself and ask why you write what are you trying to do as a writer who are you and out of who you are how will you talk to the rest of the world and I think it's that's much more crucial in a multi-platform culture because the
identity you have in each medium needs to be interrelated and people who are extremely influential I mean I'll give you an example Jordan Peterson Jordan Peterson did not imagine that he would you know occupy the cultural position he did Jordan Peterson was a clinical psychologist which meant that he wrote
These specialized academic papers and he taught in a classroom but what that you know led him to do was to be able to communicate things he finds himself in the middle of a great International public debate and he steps forward in a sense to be the representative speaker of a certain cultural Viewpoint he does
that in live appearances he does that in very focused uh filmed appearances he does that in the books uh pages of books you know and he does that in in in dialogues and things like this he even does that in ter of training people you know who are working with them to you know carry on you know this instruction and this debate that is a template for
the modern writer if you listen to the recordings of great modernist poets they have no idea how to talk to the public they and Robert Frost can do it and TS Elliott can sort of more or less do it but the other ones they never occurred to them that they would be speaking to a live audience when I think of the old
poet right if we go back to the Greeks I think of Homer with poetry but then the other word that comes to mind is rhetoric so does this mean that there's going to be a return of rhetoric and rhetoric is something to study because we're our ears are going to be so much more activated relative to our eyes rhetoric was taught and it was really
the art of public speaking to persuade listeners or the art of writing to persuade the reader I think that that is uh extremely important now what was used in rhetoric one of the things was used was poetry you know they would have you recite memorize and recite poems so that you understood how to speak to an
audience and not only convey words but to convey emotions and so I think that we live in a rhetorical Universe because we're actually much more like uh the Greeks and Romans we have writing but most of the persuasion is done through speech and so when you look at YouTube and you know every day I listen to three or four people who have relatively
highly specialized broadcasts on classical music on theology on Politics on literature on YouTube and the people who are good who have a kind of rhetorical position and they persuade me to listen and accept their point of view you know those people would not have been writing an essay every day you know they've embodied in a sense their
personality and and their message and and their expertise on a subject matter so I think that old fashion expertise which is to say clear and persuasive speaking uh is the sinqua known of success now you cannot be anything but a functionary unless you can do that I was in Washington DC for 10 years I was the
chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts for six and a half years I worked for the Aspen Institute much of what I did in addition to the management was to come into a busy Senator or congressman's office and speak to them very briefly and persuade them to listen to an agency which in many cases they disapproved of about what we were doing
why it was good and why they should support us and you get to uh to be pretty good at that rhetoric or you just perish in that kind of environment but it's true of business it's true of literature it's true of politics you know you have to be able to uh persuasively speak and if you're really lucky persuasively write and how do you
do that how do you frame and structure those arguments so that they are persuasive using rhetoric well it's like the old joke you know there's a tourist he's walking on the streets of manhatton he's got these two concert tickets and he's lost and he comes up to this person that says how do how do I get to Carnegie Hall and the person says
practice practice practice so I mean there is no substitute in life for hard work I mean if you want to have a ripped physique you got to work out you know if you want to play an instrument you have to practice if you want to be a good writer uh a good speaker you have to read you have to write you have to rewrite and you have to do all of those
things in a kind of social context you know you have to in a sense write so that people understand you which means to get to be in a feedback loop with your audience now your first audience may just be your friends or maybe a very small readership but you know you develop that and then you you know it's
like a a boxer you know you're boxing in the gym and then you may have in a successful career only 20 professional matches but you've been practicing for those 20 professional ma matches with 10,000 hours of practice and it's the same thing is it uh as a writer how many books will you publish in your life you may only publish a couple of books
Harper Lee only published one book you know while she was alive To Kill a Mocking Bird and there probably Truman capot rewrote it for her but it was successful enough that she could live the rest of her life off the fame and the royalties of that book but usually you know writing is like an iceberg most of what uh goes into writing is not
visible it's just just whatever the peak is coming out of that but I would tell people if you want to be a writer uh just do something as simple as every time time you write an email revise it make sure it's as good as you can possibly do get to yourself that you it's instinctive for you that every time you write a sentence you look
at it say how can I make that sharper how can I make it funnier uh how can I make it uh more concise and make that a way that you work I mean if you're writing a note to your wife or your husband make it witty you know just you know work it in so so uh actually work on it your whole relationship of to
language is master his we've talked a lot about grief and sorrow but I want to swing to the other side of the pendulum and talk about love poems and communicating love and that sort of emotion have you written a lot of love poems I have and and and and what have you learned about how to convey that because it seems like as much as any
kind of writing any genre it's so easy to get watered down in cliche poetry is related to magic if you go back to the ancient world like in the word for poem is Carmen but Carmen means a poem it means a magic spell it means a prophecy and it means a song Whoa so you go back to the ancient world there's this sense that what a poem is is a magic spell
which enchants uh The Listener and this is actually the title essay of my most recent book called poetry as enchantment you know we experienc this in the Rock World in popular music you know uh Madonna comes out your Lady Gaga comes out they and they enchant uh the audience they get the audience into this emotional Loop and
you know the audience is there when the audience begins to move with the music begins to tap their feet some this begins to sing along and so people pay you know $200 for a ticket to be enchanted by the spell of an artist what a poem does is to create an enchantment to create a kind of ver magical spell what a a magical spell is
are words that as they are chanted change reality so what is a love poem a love poem is a magic spell that you uh that you chant you know you want the target of it to fall in love with you or if that's too much at least to feel sorry for you you know uh and so uh I think that love poetry more than any kind of poetry needs a tune so I've
always you know written you know love poems and and I you know just try to create a spell where they can feel what I feel who's done a good job of this for you admire my favorite love po poet in the the language is probably John Dunn John Dunn was a guy who really wanted to be one of the people that ruled England
but he was kind of badly behaved he eventually became the head of St Paul's and he became the most famous preacher in England which is sort of like being the number one Hollywood star today I mean it was a position people would crowd into the St Paul's to hear these sermons and the sermons are tremendous but he invented a Kind of Love poem that
I adore and he understood that the best way to charm a girl is often to be funny and he would create this wildly comic argument that he would pursue with absolute logic I mean there a very famous One people study called the flee and he's saying well uh why do you give to the flee what you won't give to me you know the flea bites you and the
mingle of your blood you know and what I want you he really he wants to have sex with the girl but you know the flea has already bit him and bit her so their bloods are mingled so they're as good as married and so can't why can't they enjoy the yes it we the fruits of marriage so I love the notion of a love
poem that has a salacious desire but is through kind of comic logic I love uh Tennyson's love poems you know which tend to be uh you know kind of unhappy and Melancholy and I was always an unhappy and Melancholy lover so you know tears Idol tears I know not what they mean tears from the depth of some Divine despair rise in the
heart and gather in the eyes when looking on the happy Autumn fields and thinking of the days that are no more and it's just as wonderful sonorous thing so Tennyson is just writing with saying I'm going to make the music of my uh Words Be So sensuous that you fall love with I love wh aen who's you know deals with Love's Paradox you know and
so anyway I find Odin really wonderful Robert Graves is another one who I find good but I think it seems to me that you go all the way back to the ancient world uh and you have this notion of these love poems and I I quoted my own wife by reciting poems by myself and others by writing her poems well have you written
a love poem that you're proud of yes I you know I hope my pride is Justified but I was putting together my selected poems this is n called 99 poems and it's 40 years of work and when I was putting the book together um it seemed to me that I should end it with a love poem to my wife and so I wrote a poem to end the book because I I thought it was a
tribute to the to this woman I'd shared my life with and I've tried to keep my marriage and my kids out of my work except the elegies from my son who died and so I wrote this and I think it's a nice poem because we do not have enough poems about happy marriages about the joy of finding a person with whom you
can share your life your decision to be a Catholic writer and how the style of of an almost biblical style has infused into your work and I went back and I read prayer at winter solstice yes and the end goes like this blessed are the Saint and The Sinner who redeem each other blessed are the Dead Calm in their perfection blessed is the pain that
humbles us blessed is the distance that bars our joy blessed is the shortest day that makes us long for light blessed is the love that in losing we discuss ever and the language there is very biblical that poem is uh a poem that probably people who are not Christian or Catholic won't understand because that poem is
based on something that I did not believe I think when I was a kid but everything that is given to you in life every suffering every pain every loss that if you can accept eventually becomes a kind of blessing my son's death transformed me into a Kinder more patient and uh empathetic person than I was before when I was young I was
successful at everything I did I didn't appreciate uh this I think the Sorrows the difficulties that most people had like they just worked harder if they did this they they'd succeed it humbled me and so what that poem is uh is really about how the the cold the distance the loneliness the loss these are all things which uh develop
our spiritual strength if they are accepted and properly dealt with I have been a c you know been a Catholic all my life I didn't really write uh in an overt way as a Catholic through much of my career because you know I was writing about things I was participating in the mainstream literary world my Catholicism
was there as it were under the the surface my values uh were there but it was about 15 uh maybe almost 20 years ago I realized that the culture I was in the literary the academic uh the intellectual culture had become more and more anti-christian and anti-catholic I mean I would just see these attacks consistently across uh you know the
certain Publications every issue about it and I said well if this is what I believe I have to step forward and I knew that that would alienate me among many people who were literary uh uh Gatekeepers but they were already mad at me you know because I you know I was I did all of these things such as give bad reviews to powerful
people and things I was not playing the rules of the New York literary game and so I began to write poems that I wouldn't have written otherwise and then I wrote an essay called the Catholic writer today that essentially became a kind of international statement that me people all over the world began to respond to it you know what happens is
interesting because if you take something that's forbidden or that's under attack and you articulate why you think that's wrong it gives other people the courage to step forward and so one of the things that I did with this is I created uh a Catholic writers conference invited only people I thought uh who were writers of the highest quality uh
who were good people of of fine fine character who were persuasive public speakers and I put together a kind of dream roster and I said you could come for free and I'll feed you because I thought that was a Christian thing too you welcome them in you don't charge a you know people thought I was nuts you got to charge a fee you're going to go
and I and I said uh if it's the right idea people will step forward and pay for it for us and indeed they did and suddenly they're in this group and they realize you know I'm I'm not uh crazy I mean there's all these smart intelligent people that share my beliefs and this community was created and you know I had
done it because uh one of the foundational books for me in my life is St Augustine's city of God and and it's a it's a long complicated book but at the core of this Augustine is writing this book after the vandals have come and destroyed Rome they you know they've looted it you know they've stripped it they've burned part of it down and
people are going oh my God the world is ending because Rome has fallen and Augustine says there are two cities that exist there's the city of man which is you know ruled by wealth and power and all the laws of man but there's another city that is there as well that is eternal and is invisible which is the city of God in which all of those who
have elected to live by the rules of God inhabit and this struck me years ago as a way of organizing uh as it were my social activities if I'm going to do a conference it's got to be in the city of God not in the city of man people have got to walk in and understand gee the rules by which the outer world is regulated are not in effect here and
here uh we treat each other as equals we respect each other uh we're dedicated to truth we're dedicated to those things which uh as it were call forth our best self and so immediately doing it at USC with these people people said I want to do this at my campus I want to do this and so we've done it at forom we've done
it at uh uh lyola Chicago he entered at University of Dallas and this last fall we did it at Notre Dame each one is bigger than the one before we have 1300 registered people in Notre Dame you see a movement and what happens these people begin to create reading groups magazines presses and you know create the
infrastructure because what I think we have to do in the United States is we have to create a counterculture the culture we have is broken but a culture is a very complicated thing it has all these uh ecological niches and all of these uh you know parts of this Machinery of culture and so we've got to create the schools the journals the
websites the podcasts the Publishers the social things all of which give a more positive productive view of what the Arts and what culture are doing and I've tried to do that for Catholic literary culture you know which is only one part of the larger thing but every healthy productive Community you create contributes to the health of the whole
I'm an old man now I'm you know I'm 74 the two things that I want to accomplish uh most is I want to finish my career as a poet you know I want to continue to write uh the best poems possible and I want to help Foster a serious Catholic artistic culture in the United States to restore it and it's actually more than
restoration because we've never had an entirely healthy you know one here I will not be alive to enjoy the fruits of this so the the form that takes is me working with Young Writers young Publishers Young Artists young musicians and trying to help them uh create a context in which to lead their lives I feel this on an intuitive level but I
don't have the language to describe what's going on what is it about biblical language and the way that it's developed that gives it a sense of awe and grander and how how does that apply to infusing poetry with with a sense of emotion well as a poet uh to me the two greatest books in the English language
are the works of Shakespeare and the King James Bible we had the incredible blessing in English which other languages don't have by the way I mean if you ask a Frenchman or an Italian about biblical language well it they don't really have it so much because they were using the Latin more than they were the the verac but we had this
incredible event is in the Protestant Reformation they uh decided to at the period where English was most magnificently written uses Shakespeare's era to translate uh the Bible again into English and so you have this extraordinary translation of the Bible I know some Christians say no I want you know it's too formal this that the other
but it doesn't matter because you can have many versions of the Bible if you're lucky you know you can read it in the original but you know we take different translations but we have a foundational translation in English which for several hundred years most people heard many times a day and so it began to form the whole way that people
heard English as an elevated language well one of the things that I've noticed from a few of the poems that you've read is that you'll start a a little bit more concrete and approachable and then you'll end with something more Cosmic and it almost feels like a gradient in order to get there yeah well you I mean
I like to write is I like to start something that interests you then I like to take a turn that surprises you then I po is long I'll do it again and so uh you know you have to earn your right to talk about things that are vast you know if you start off by saying you know these abstractions they're unconvincing they feel borrowed can you tell me about
your commonplace book yes a commonplace book which is a term that many people don't understand is a book in which you copy things you want to remember usually things from you're reading and so I I uh filled three or four of them in my life this one uh I just at the beginning it says begun May 1978 New York uh finished
August 1984 Hastings on Hudson New York all that means is I started it there and I filled it up passages of books that I read I go back and it's really quite interesting because you know I I remember the books that I read I you know uh here's a thing I wrot by Pascal if you do not possess the strength to follow me at least do not hold me back
Philip Larin this poet I like and this is a wonderful P because most things are never meant which is to say the things that happen are often unintended consequences but I you know I fill you know fill it up and I filled another one up here this is one that I actually was um finding various things that I liked
and I was marking them but this goes from 1986 in New York to 2016 in Los Angeles you know and it's just uh you know probably you know a thousand little quotations in here and here's the one I'm working on now and I look back and I you know I just see like on this page I've got COV stall nich Shakespeare it's a wonderful thing by
the the uh extraordinarily Wise by George balenine he goes God creates I assemble wow and that's actually I think a profound notion of art which is that you know artists we don't create there's creation and we respond and we imitate creation and we take elements of creation and we assemble them uh and that's why the work resonates because
you know uh what do we share we all share reality our artist works with the things of reality to create something that can communicate but was you know balen Sheen said that in four words go God creates I assemble he takes the human body he takes motions he takes the laws of gravity and thermodynamics and out of that you know he create created
the New York City Ballet really the best choreographer ever done is that commonplace book just a list of good quote this is a way of me preserving uh things that I find insightful and wise so you could say they're good quotes but they're things that when they struck me when I read that comment by Bal I said I have
to write that down because it's it's a it's a you know a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to Forget You know to quote Frost definition of poetry again Augustine goes he goes I had become to myself a place of unhappiness in which I could not bear to be but I could not Escape From Myself and I read that you
know I said you know Augustine is describing the the what my life was like at a certain point in my life I was unhappy uh but I couldn't escape from my own unhappiness because I was defining my world is myself and I think those of us who are Christian uh understand that we I think we got to be really Frank about it we
surrender to a power greater than ourselves this is very Catholic to say but the the happiness of Christianity even when things are going bad the happiness is to say that you try to make everything you do meaningful in the eyes of eternity the smallest action in your life done well uh has consequence there's nothing
in your life that's meaningful there's nothing in your life that cannot be used productively once you get into that Rhythm it's joyful because it puts your sorrows in perspective it puts your pleasures in perspective and uh every moment of your life has meaning so that's what the commonplace book is it is in one sense just a collection of
quotes but on the other sense it is a pool that you can dive into where there's this whole tapestry where you can read a quote and have that whole Chain of Thought from presumably most of the quotes that are in there yeah well the thing is it if you read a lot if you live a lot uh you just forget a lot of things yeah and so the question is you
should choose what you want to remember one of the beauties of great language is I can give you a sentence uh that's just full of electricity you know think about this there's two kinds of communicating meaning you can have a kind of intellectual meaning that's a laser you know Cuts right to the point or you can
radiate meanings in different directions and I feel as a poet uh I'm trying to radiate as a Pros writer I'm trying to be laser focused and it's two different kinds of writing but they're both based on light on illumin on reaching people I want to try something and we'll see how this works what I want to do is I want to just
throw different genres and writers at you and ask you to give me a quick response on something that you've learned from them or a lesson that we can glean okay bodair bodair is the greatest poet of having up your life I mean and see a lot of people you know love boder because he's you know he he's about evil some people hate him you
know uh you know hate him because he's about evil but all of us fail all of us have this kind of notion of you're just heading downhill and you can't stop it at times and boder turns that into the subject of his poetry so you know it's the great uh uh great song of failure Marsh mclan Marshall mclen was this religious Visionary who thought
he was a technological expert and he understood before anybody else did uh that the media that we use have spiritual Dimensions that we experience but we don't explain so he was very famous then for 20 30 Years everybody simply mocked Marshall mclu and nobody read him he was a subject then suddenly we find ourselves at the beginning of
the first century and we go you know this is exactly what mclan told us was going to happen I think he's a Visionary technologist you know probably in American history the greatest one that ever lived you know he was never selling you a product except for Marshall mclen yeah uh and I think most of his wacky uh
Notions Pro to be true Bob Dylan I love Bob Dylan when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize writers went nuts because somehow it like he was poaching on their territory these and the swedes I'm sure chose Bob Dylan for all the wrong reasons and he humiliated them but you know he's a poet when you listen to Dylan he's borrowed all the tunes it's
the lyrics uh you know that are there so I think Bob Dylan he changed the nature of pop music he changed the nature of of American folk song of the American rock song and he gave us the images to understand the kind of weird uh industrial Urban environment that we find ourselves how about the Beatles I love the Beatles I wouldn't
make great intellectual defense of the Beatles but you know I love their songs uh and I think it's interesting that they were Never As Good separately as they were together and the Beatles uh remind us of just the the power of artistic collaboration how sometimes you put a couple of people together and they're greater than they are
individually the speeches of Martin Luther King Martin Luther King um may have been the last uh great you know political speaker in the United States and I think it's because he anchored uh his talks uh in the Bible in his Christian Vision uh in a a way that's rhetorically magnificent and morally irrefutable you know you get
Beyond him and people become partisan they become quibbling but uh Martin Luther King calls us all to a kind of common uh Christian decency country music I'm not a big fan of country music but I do love a lot of individual songs rock is the music of mating country music is the the music of having a job and having a marriage so it's a
different set of Sorrows but anyway uh uh you know it's it's it's something I listen to on the radio but I don't buy albums John Steinbeck Steinbeck is a magnificent and imperfect writer he's uh maybe the greatest novelist to come out of California the his only competition there really is probably Jack London if you read The Grapes of Wrath for all of
grapes of wrath's imperfections he has written one of the greatest American novels because he's done something that we forget which is he's shown us the Dignity of the poor the Dignity of the outcasts I think part of the problem we have in the United States is that even the poor have forgotten their dignity even the
outcasts have forgotten their dignity you know Steinbeck you know in a sense has created the Epic of the you know of the outcast poor John chever I love John chever who gets so respect you know it's you know John Sher for people who don't know them was is the person who published more stories in the New Yorker
than anyone else and they tend to be little stories of middle class life either in Manhattan or the suburbs but when I read John Cher I was in high school and I had no idea that there was any place in the United States that people took a train to work or these things I just thought they were fables that he made up I loved them because
they were wonderful Parables usually of moral falling and moral Redemption and then I came back you know I moved to New York where I lived 20 years and I lived in Cher country all these people were were living lives exactly out of a John Cher story and I realized more than ever he wasn't a realist he was a fabulous and
he has written some of the most beautiful paragraphs I've ever read I've taken his paragraphs and I've looked at them word by word and say how does he do this this all in 20 lines what did you learn by doing that I've learned the importance of the evocative detail how he can you can take something and then have a single sentence that is just
overwhelming there's a a story of his he used to read it uh called the death of Justina and it's a John chever New Yorker story because it's about Aunt Justina comes to your house and dies but because of zoning difficulties you can't get anybody to pick up the body so every night you know Aunt justtina is still you know is still there nobody will get
the body his his wife can't take it she moves away takes the kids and he's trying to deal with this so it's this comic social satire of suburban regulations but it's wrapped around it is essentially this parable of facing death it's amazing to me you could bring it off because it's low comedy social comedy religious
Vision he has this dream it starts off with saying on Sunday I gave up tobacco uh and alcohol B of these uh these small Pleasures I watched the sunrise with with the horror that the that the earliest people must have done of of Darkness descending on the world from which you would never recover and it goes you know just goes through these
things and it's like a little detail about the house and it's this Cosmic thing and it's this kind of uh you you know manipulation but like the fact that he has this dream where uh you're in a supermarket where everything is is just white and unwrapped you only have these shapes that you can vaguely do it it's this
wonderful kind of Twilight Zone detail and then to have them unwrapped in front of you by people that mock you you know he creates these things and he he does it in a page a novelist would do make these things 30 pages long but he does it in a paragraph all right I got more for you this is great Tarantino Quenton
Tarantino is morally repulsive cinematically arresting and you know he's a kind of of La lowcost bodair you know he puts his you know face into the muck and shows you you know uh you know how to you know makes you interested in it I think he does things which are uh cinematically fascinating but but morally unacceptable although I do think
once upon a time in Hollywood is a great film I think he actually recovers himself in this and I think he ends up with a fil film that's a that's a wonderful film tolken tolken is an amazing writer because in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings he takes what is a kind of second class genre the kind of Ye Ye Old fantasy thing and he turns it
into literature I think the Lord of the Rings is the greatest novel in English written about the first world war and it's about a decent fellow who is dragged into a war which he doesn't want to fight but he conducts himself honorably going through great pain great loss uh and interestingly you know comes out of it morally strengthened in aware
in a way that he wasn't so I mean you know it's it is the uh the English version of War and Peace you know Frodo you know is Pierre well now you got me think about Russian literature dovi dovi is a great uh kind of crazy novelist in a way I mean and in Russia you've got totoy and you've got dfki dfki is a religious Visionary totoy who
is equally religious is a kind of social uh psychological Visionary if I was asked you know the you know my top 10 great novels tolto and dovi would both be be honored I think Anna Corina is the greatest novel ever written I think Brothers katsov is one of the three or four greatest novels ever written crime and punishment is a
tremendous novel but then you get the novels like the idiot or the possessed which I think have great moments but they're kind of sprawling books which you know he doesn't reign in sufficiently but you know he's one of the great great writers of the western tradition period I just listed a lot of people so I got to ask when you're
reading are you writing down thoughts in the moment what sort of interpretation are you doing how are you reading or are you just plopping your head on the couch and just flipping Page by Page like most people would well I you know when I read I don't take notes if I you know I hate to take notes when I'm reading because I
it interrupts the the thing of the book but I'm a serious reader there's a few things that I haven't read but I've spent you know my life reading you know reading books and tried to read as many of the Great novels as possible and then I try to reread them um you know and uh when you reread them you're often you
know since it's been 20 30 years since you first read them it's a different book but I the novel to me is the literary form uh that that I'm most immersed in I you know I read novels as a kid I continue I continue to read them it's the form that disappoints me the most because I don't think we have many great novelists right now I think what
isn't being taught or understood you know I'll buy a book and it'll just be about a little group of people in a little subculture doing what they do and it never gets out out of this well this takes place in a creative writing Department this takes place in this that the other but look at you know Anna Karenina you know it's really about this
about Russian Society there's people from all these different levels that are that are interacting there's you know the tragic story of an unhappy marriage you know the not without difficulty story of of a happy marriage and you come out of that and you feel like wow you know I've looked into the center of life I mean Crime and
Punishment it which is about this you know this student who feels he's entitled because he's a superior mind of you know killing a nasty old Pond broker going through that there another character stuff Rogan who's actually the most interesting character in this this kind of seductor you know who's doing all of these things but you come out of
there and you feel like you've descended into to the the way that people rationalize doing bad things uh and you've just barely come out alive that's the thing about dfki he scares you I think that's what Tarantino is trying to do I think he's trying to scare you but Tarantino doesn't really have any higher
moral Vision that redeems you there's certain knowledge only Darkness knows and you have to descend into evil you have to descend into darkness you have to descend into hell to learn this knowledge so she goes it is easy to descend into hell but coming out again into the light in you know Vengeance and violence and and uh uh sadism and things
like this I translated a play by senica called Hercules furin The Madness of Hercules and Hercules goes into the underworld and when he comes out he's been contaminated by it and he goes mad and kills his family and I think there's a real wisdom that uh you know Ides who wrote the first version and senica who
wrote the that version of this which is that you cannot spend time in evil and in darkness without running tremendous moral danger that's Bode bodair says I'm never getting out of this is this the story of the knowledge of the tree of Good and Evil that there's certain kinds of knowledge that are basically a deal with the Devil
that yes you get knowledge but it's not not not the way I had not thought of that as in terms of even the Apple but they are in a sense they you know they're promised power from this and uh from this knowledge obviously they can't deal with the knowledge I mean it's you know you know God is kicking them out but there's you know what's the first
thing that happens when they get this knowledge is they become ashamed of their bodies right put the Fig leaves because they they uh and I think implicitly they real you know sex goes from this joyful natural function to something they realize they can misuse well what's the connection here with Odus and wisdom because when he goes
past the muses he puts the wax in his ears and that's one of the things that they entice him with in order for anus to do this he has to have the golden bow which becomes the the title of this this great mythological thing that's you know looking at Universal mythology that Sir James Fraser writes but he has to have
is it word divine uh protection and the thing that uh is the violation that Hercules does is he going to hell is his last Labor because he has to bring up Cerberus the three-headed dog who guards the underworld and when he brings this Unholy being into the light he violates the Primal tabos that that which is in the darkness must stay
in the darkness in every mythology a division between the gods above and the gods below uh the the sky gods and the demons you know each is supposed to stay in their realm and we know you can't really be a Christian without believing in demons because I mean Christ is dealing with them constantly through the
gospels this is what tolken is talking about where does tolkien's things take place on Middle Earth hell below Heaven above and this is the realm of Mortals and the Middle Earth is what it's a Battleground last question I want to talk about what you've learned from operas about building great characters those are
specific kind of character but what have you learned well you know Opera is a very strange medium because it is so intense and compressed people make fun of operatic uh plots because it's not like a novel they don't say it does this this and all the motivations they just say this happens this happens this happens happens one of the greatest operas ever
written which is laboom is four scenes and in those four scenes you see you know two love affairs you know Come Together Fall Apart become reunited you see uh you know people dealing with success with failure and eventually the death of of the leading lady from tuberculosis same thing in lat travata so uh what I learned in Opera is to have
uh you know a kind of Rapid PLT which cuts the connction ing tissues out intense scenes of emotion and I'm a poet I was trained to write for the page and that's why I think I've been able to make a transition to the 21st century that my work is actually uh more current today than it was 30 years ago because I was
predicting this cultural change but writing for Opera I had to learn something else which is I had to write something that was simple enough uh that the composer could take it and add everything the composer needed to do and give them room so if you have it too tightly you know the composer can't get through it and I see the really bad liti
this way you know they're really intricately written and the composer doesn't know what to do with it except add background music it has to be able to come at song so that's the first thing so writing for the composer secondly I've got to write for the audience because here's the Dilemma people never can understand every word
that's being sung We Miss words so I have right for the composer I write for the audience has to be simple enough that if they miss a word they can still get the gist of it okay those two are maybe more obvious but the third thing I I learned is I had to write for the singer I had to give the singer words and a character that the singer could
become so that they could they would know everything about the character including things I never write that they know what the character wants where the characters come from and so I have to give uh words that the the singer can literally I mean literally embody so as far as characters concerned what makes a
good character in Opera and how is that different from a novel the nature of the novel most people don't understand what a novel is and this was a a revolutionary notion in literature a novel is a story that tells you simultaneously what's happening on the outside of a character and what they're thinking on the inside and so the novel
is a perfect form for the modern world where the outer world we live in may be different from the inner World which we're imagining remembering and feeling so the novel is essentially ironic it has an outer thing and then whatever is going on you know two two meanings at once Opera works very differently you know how do we know the inner life of a
singer they sing it to you and the music carries you through so you have a plot but the plot exists maybe five minutes or 10 minutes of you know plot and scene setting and everything else and then suddenly there's a laser that comes out of you there who goes from her inner life to yours and that's what people good they operate they are riveted by suddenly
participating in the inner life of a character in great joy and great pain and great confusion so there's a kind of hypnotic transference that goes on that is intensive that is lyrical and is holistic so when you're writing Opera you're trying to write moments of great emotion in a way which drags doesn't drag that in that uh
entrances the audience to join and then walk me through a character from a novel that you really think the author nailed and show me how there's the difference between the internal and the external an a coredor greatest her whatever you know you meet her as a young woman you see everything that's ever happened to you
you see what she thinks then she resolves this and she changes her mind about that and she does this and she gets falls into she's married but fires A Love Affair and he has thing a 800 Pages later she jumps in front of a train and you you're with her every moment L travat you know which is about vieta who's a cortisen so it's you know
she's a essentially a kind of high class prostitute the First Act of latravia I don't know it's probably maybe 25 minutes long within about five or six minutes you get to know her and by the end of 25 minutes you've been inside of her heart you've been inside of her confusion you've been inside of all the
Dil that she does and she then she never lets you go and she ends up dying of of tuberculosis in the last act but there's a sudden transference and you you don't have all the careful things the music uh has to take you 200 pages into what a novel's text would be Opera tells a story in the way that Greek tragedy tells a story that
rather than you know be Homer and be in 24 books you know it takes place in about an hour and so you have to jump into it and you jump into it by having lyric moment lyric so you got this peak this peak this peak with a little bit of connecting tissue and what people go for it it's not the connective tissue it's not the oh I love lraa because of the
social backstory no you love it because of these these moments and so oper you did it through Melody through drama and that's why in Opera like all poetic forms I can take an ARA you know out of the Opera and I can perform it in a you know in a concert hall or I can put it on the radio and you still feel it because it's
a self-contained lyric moment you really can't you know I say oh I'm going to read you uh Pages 111 through 117 of anak coren and you'll say well who's this character why is this person there is this person you know you can't make any sense out of it because it's part of a continuity Opera like poetry is
wonderfully acceptable I can you know I can take you know a line from Shakespeare I can take it out of context and you'll feel the power sweet are the uses of adversity you know this our life exempt from public haunt finds tongues in trees books in running Brooks sermons in stones and good in everything you don't know who's saying it you don't
know why they're saying it but you say okay still beautiful it's this version that Vision that life is good that the world is good and and in fact you're doing anaca a disservice if you take five pages out of context and say this is anaca it is an anacom anacara is this great you know extended context which gives you the
most compelling portrait of the inner life of a woman anybody's ever written in history people ask what to do with op and I and I it's actually the the very people that are on the cover of this there's this great production this is of weep shutter die yeah of laem by Opera Australia that was directed by this guy who then became a famous filmmaker BOS
lurman Mulan Rouge Romeo and Juliet uh and he does this and I just tell people here's a link watch this for 11 minutes and they all come back I got to have more of this because it's where uh Mimi this this seamstress meets Rolo this poet and within a moment they follow love and it sets the Opera in motion you
can have this brief moment in an opera that sweeps you off your feet narrative art and lyric art operate differently and if you're a writer you damn well better understand the difference or you're in trouble when I read most Opera lettos I just go o you know uh they're they're giving you a stage play you know they're not lyric and so I think that
you know for any writer understand the the way your genre works not the rules of your genre but what is that genre why do people come to that genre what's the experience they want from that genre and give it to them doesn't mean to cheapen it or anything else but to give them the best possible version of that
experience and the big lesson I've taken from this interview is just the tremendous amount of study that you've put into that I mean going all the way back to the beginning of just breaking down the poems that's going to be one of the big things I take away and the other thing about how much I talk that was fun thank you my pleasure