Writers Recommend

“In the poem ‘He Would Never Use One Word Where None Would Do,’ Philip Levine says: ‘Fact is, silence is the perfect water: / unlike rain it falls from no clouds….’ I attach to this Denise Levertov’s idea that a poet must be brought to speech—what we write must be felt so intensely, it ‘wakes in [the poet] this demand: the poem.’

“When I’m managing to write regularly, I always have a collection of poems in translation on my desk. I’ll usually begin a writing session by reading a few poems from the collection and copying out the lines that speak to me. Then, I’ll re-organize those lines into a new poem, editing the lines or improvising my own language. During this process, I usually stumble upon a new phrase or image, which I’ll then use as the starter for a new draft. I often sense distance in a translated poem, and it is precisely this distance that frees me to experiment with the language.

“I believe that writers should have a childlike sense of wonder about the world. But wonder is hard to come by when life is there with its demands on your attention, always with its problems—the long commute, the friend who snubbed you, the coworker or student who needs your help. For me, renewing that sense of wonder is a cornerstone of my writing practice. And whenever I feel like I’ve lost it, I head to the aquarium. I often go alone.

“Let’s say I’m trying to write a long poem about rainbow herbicides, the production of Agent Orange in New Jersey, ecological disaster, and a parent having leukemia, and I get stuck. There’s a problem with where to go next in the poem. Or there’s a transition I can’t seem to get right. Instead of looking even more closely at the poetry models that have helped me build the poem, I turn instead to something totally opposite, like a few of Carl Phillips’s small, intense poems about desire.