Eric Folsom is the Poet Laureate of Kingston. On finding your way to a new poem he advises,
“To start, you want to look for a poem-shaped hole. Choosing a subject, looking for inspiration, doing piles of research, that’s all well and good. But what you aim for is the poem and the poem is a wily, elusive creature. Spend your time watching and waiting. Look carefully at your surroundings. If you’ve got the patience you will perceive a space where the poem ought to be. Just the right shape, the right moment, the perfect environment. For unexplained reasons, some poem that ought to exist, right there, doesn’t. That’s what you’re looking for, the missing item. The poem that deserves to be.
Forget that nonsense about finding your voice. Who told you that you only had one? Who said you’d lost it? You are not finding your voice, you are finding your freedom. The voice will be ready and waiting for you when you need it. Trust.
[…]
While you’re composing the latest and greatest you, bear in mind the following tiresome, unnecessary identities.
Although you love to party and tell yarns afterward, you are not Charles Bukowski. There was only one. He’s dead. Trying to imitate him just makes you look like Rob Ford.
You are not Gertrude Stein. Modernism is 100 years old, dude. The phrase “Make it new” first appeared during the Shang Dynasty in China. (Translation: a long, long time ago.) Don’t worry about making it new, make it better. Or better still, make it beautiful.”
You can read it in entirety: Eric Folsom On Writing
Over at the Rusty Toque Gary Barwin is interviewed. In the question on process:
I do find that I get energy from jumping from one kind of writing to another. Prose reminds me what poetry can do and vice versa. Sometimes, though, I do need to burrow deep into something to give it time to develop—this was certainly was the case with the novel—but then after a long writing session, or sometimes intermittently in the middle of one, I’d write something else as a palate cleanser, on a lark as a diversion, or as a kind of footnote to the main project.
I think I write a lot because writing serves many purposes for me. It is a way of figuring things out, a way of working through things, a way of knowing, of experiencing things, of exploring. It is an entertainment, an obsession, a mode of social engagement, of doodling, of spiritual practice, of trying to become a “better” (more thoughtful? more compassionate? more observant?) person, a way of creating, experiencing, and responding the energy and possibility around me and in language.
In terms of process, I don’t know that I have a single mode of creation. Often it is the slow accumulation of work, chipping away at ideas or larger forms. I don’t know where I’m going. I have a place where I start writing, but I always consider that the writing knows more than me so I trust the process of writing itself and where it is taking me rather than my ideas for the project. I try to listen to where it is going. I means lots of revision and recalculating.
In its absorbing entirety: Gary Barwin Interview at The Rusty Toque
Over at Hazlitt a rare new poem by David O’Meara,
I’m still. That’s how it feels.
I wait all winter for the animal to die,
raise its chin, look
into time. I
lack sun and Lord Tequila. I wonder
where good comes. Here in my head
I’m a herd of one, and rage, slosh unease like brine.
[…]
I’m home, low-ceilinged. I too
would grow an avocado, my wooden core
a seed.
[…]
If only we were issued writers hats I’d hang up mine at poems like that. Or that stanza. As is have to continue.