About Creativity

Are there any habits or tactics that you use to help feed your creativity?

I’m a poet, I guess, because the tempo of a poem fits into my life. If I had a different kind of discipline, I’m sure I would write infinitely long novels. Poems ride along on the tip of your eyelash and can come and go in a blink. It’s important that you be there when they want to happen. And the way to be there is to give yourself time to percolate; you can read, you can walk, you can sit there and dream.

The other part is to be ready when they are. Which is to say, a notebook and a writing implement are your passport. I love writing in darkened theaters and at art museums. But it’s also important to have [these tools] beside your bed so no dream gets lost.

What do you do when you’re feeling creatively dry?

I read. There are a few marvelous exercises I love. I studied with Kenneth Koch at Columbia, so I’m in love with imitations — writing imitations of the greats who came before you. Finding out your own tastes as a poet, creating your own lineage is part of the job.

The thing to remember about a poem is that it is not made of emotions. It’s not made of wisdom. It’s not made of your most secret interior life being vomited out on a page. It’s made out of words. So start with words — what word is working for you right now? And put that down.

If you need a word, I also suggest going to the bookshelf and saying, well whose word do I need? I find myself often needing a John Ashbery word, so I just go to Ashbery, and I open him up, and I find a word in there that’s going to work. All poets’ vocabularies are distinct, so what kind of word do you need? If you need a Wanda Coleman word, you’re going to go to Wanda. Translating experience into words, all you need to do is open your eyes to the silence like John Cage did, and the poem’s right in front of you.

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Can you describe your creative process?

I have few to no patterns, and even less dogma about how to write, or how I write. Poetry tends to come to me naturally or not at all. I spent years trying out different exercises and forms like most everyone, but the truth is that I don’t do that anymore. It may sound mystical or retro or simply depressing, but I increasingly feel myself to be a hostage to poetic impulse. I usually have to wait until a poem comes along, or until I see what’s there to be written, as Robert Creeley once put it. For me a poem often begins as a constellation of words coursing through my head like little electric shocks. This often happens when I’m in great pain or pleasure, doing laps in a pool, or in the bardo between sleeping and waking. I don’t know why. The words feel like irritants in the soft lap of an oyster, as Henry James had it. Then the pearl — if one could call it that with a straight face — starts to congeal around the irritant. A snowball in the muck.

As for non-poetry projects, that’s a different story. Usually I do a lot of reading or research until something takes possession of me. I think of research like throwing lots of crap in a cauldron — bones, feathers, blood, everything — and turning up the heat: eventually it has to come to a boil. (Whether you make something edible is a different question.) Or, let me put it this way: Often a baby in a subway station will scream back at a loud train hurtling through. If you send a train of information hurtling through your brain often and fast enough, and if the train screeches loudly enough, you may eventually find yourself yelling back.

Are there any techniques that you use to spark new poems or gather up ideas?

I don’t use any techniques per se…but I take a lot of notes, wandering around in the world. I used to keep diaries, then legal pads; now I don’t know what I keep. Scraps, I guess. I tend to write a poetry based on fact and feeling, or the fact of feeling, or the feeling of fact, etc., which mostly means I write down “facts” — observed things that interest me in the world — and, alongside, my feelings (loosely defined). Painter Joan Mitchell once described her gargantuan abstract paintings as “remembered landscapes which involve my feelings”; I think of my poems similarly, though I usually try to write from within the landscape rather than from my memory of it — to avoid nostalgia, or bad faith. Two sections of my next book of poems, Something Bright, Then Holes, bear this out literally: The first section, “The Canal Diaries,” was written in a single notebook at the shore of the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn; the second, “The Hospital for Special Care,” was written at a friend’s bedside in a hospital by that name. I like site-specific projects. Maybe because if I plunk myself down in a place with a pen, I rarely find myself bored.

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