Writing a poem is always a process of subtracting: you start with all of language available to you, and you choose a smaller field.
I have a vague memory of seeing an image of a child in an iron lung and the phrase “sad little breathing machine” coming into my head. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that on certain days – the worse ones – we could all be described as sad little breathing machines.
Poems can’t help but be personal. Mine are certainly an accurate blueprint of the things I think about, if not a record of my daily life.
I would love to collaborate on a graphic novel with an artist – I’m terrible at drawing but I really love that genre.
I’m pretty lenient with myself about time – if I feel like taking photographs of small things inside ice cubes or making animal collages, I just do it. When I want to write, I write. It’s all part of the same thing for me.
Having my poems set to music by Eric Moe has completely knocked my socks off.
I don’t think that you can say by any stretch of the imagination that all Wisconsin or Brooklyn-based poets write in a particular way. Similar sensibilities can spring up next to each other in the flower bed, or across oceans.
I guess I’m a bit of a projector – my emotions tend to get translated into different, fanciful situations.
I think all poetry is accessible in a certain sense if you spend enough time with it.
I am pretty interested in hybrid forms. I love graphic novels and I think there should be more graphic poems in the world.
I let my narrative embroidering impulses take over in prose poems.
We humans have an amazing way of making everything personal.
When I have my students do erasures, I’m always amazed by the way their voice comes through, whether they’re doing an erasure of a romance novel or an encyclopedia. Your sensibility will out.
Usually form seems to find me in the process of writing a poem, though I have nothing against starting out with the form.
I don’t think all poems need to be written in conversational language – those are often great poems but there should also be poems of incoherent bewilderment and muddled mystery.
Poems tend to have instructions for how to read them embedded in their language.
I write poems from dreams pretty frequently. It’s limiting to think the poem has to come from a sensical lyric “I” stating things clearly or dramatically. This whole course is trying to say there are millions of ways to approach writing a poem.
I don’t like basements, but definitely basements could be poems. Not fond of skin diseases, but again, there’s a pattern. Probably anything could be a poem.
I think poetry involves heightened noticing or imagining as well as creating a certain made shape. On the other hand, that shape can be made just by pointing at something and saying, “That’s a poem.”
A lot of people are writing poems and don’t realize it. They have this limited idea of how the poem should sound or what subjects it should address.