And my experience is the best titles, for me, emerge in the process of writing. They don't usually come at the very beginning and hopefully they don't come at the very end because then it's getting late in the day.
I guess that would have been 1968. I was a freshman in college and I wasn't writing good poems, but I was at least trying to write poems then.
I think it's one of the things that drive lyric poetry, our sense of mortality.
I think one of the things that distinguished my work from the beginning when I was in college was my turning towards poetry from other countries.
Now, I do say, "It's possible. You might be the first. I'm not saying it's impossible, but the odds are very much against you." All great poets have been great readers and the way to learn your craft in poetry is by reading other poetry and by letting it guide you.
And when my second book had come out, "Wild Gratitude," I went to Pearl London's class and she worked through different drafts of poems and there were the drafts of my poem, "Wild Gratitude," and I saw that I had begun the poem with the title "August 13th."
A certain construct of emotions that really define who you are and who you will become and I feel very much that my childhood is very alive inside of me, very close to me, very much part of me. And it's a sometimes painful, sometimes joyous inexhaustible resource for poetry.
I didn't ever consider poetry the province exclusively of English and American literature and I discovered a great amount in reading Polish poetry and other Eastern European poetry and reading Russian poetry and reading Latin American and Spanish poetry and I've always found models in those other poetries of poets who could help me on my path.
I started then to try and shape something rather than just express it and when I started to shape something and to imitate other poems that were written by other people, when I had tried to integrate my reading and my writing I was on my path.
She [Carol Parsinan] somehow read my poems and came back to me and convinced me that I could be a poet, that I had the passion and the enthusiasm and the creativity to become a poet, but that what I was writing was not poetry because I was just expressing my feelings and I wasn't try to make anything.
When I was a freshman in college I went to Grinnell College in Iowa. I brought my poems to my freshman humanities teacher whose name was Carol Parsinan, a wonderful teacher. And Carol did a really great thing for me. She taught me more than anyone.
That you write a phrase or you think of something and it seems to have a deeper charge because the title has to be some kind of marker, something setting out a space, creating a space for what's going to come.
After my grandfather died I went down to the basement of my family house where my family kept books, anthologies and things and there was an anthology without any names attached to it and I read a poem called Spellbound and I somehow attached it to my grandfather's death and I thought my grandfather had written it.
I didn't sit down then and start writing poems, but it was in the back of my mind.
I mean, when I was young I could write all through the night and I loved to work late into the night. Now that I'm older I work really well in the early morning when your synapses are firing a little better. But I work at different times of the day.
In high school I was leafing through an anthology that our teachers had given up and I found a poem, I go, "That's so strange. This poem looks so much like my grandfather's poem."
Now, that can be a traditional form or it can be something you're inventing. It can be the development of a metaphor, the working through of a metaphor.
One, something emotional has to be at stake. There has to be something important for me that I'm writing about. And then two, I have to have a formal idea. Something has to be being worked out in poetry.
And what I've found over time is that for me to write a poem that I think is worthy that I can live with, two things have to happen.
But, that was the beginning, though I didn't start writing until I was in high school and when I was in high school I really began to write poetry with great energy and enthusiasm.
Sometimes I have a feeling that I just can't get rid of. Sometimes there's an experience that I want to write about that I have to get off my chest. Sometimes there are some words that appeal to you.
I think poetry will survive and I don't think it will be the end of poetry. Our tremendous onslaught of mass media all the time that we're suffering and we don't really know how to think about, I think that puts certain things at risk.
And when I'm writing well and when I'm inside the feeling, then I can do fairly complicated things with some fluency.
Now, as I've gotten older I've been able to write more quickly. Sometimes I get in the space of something and I can do a lot in a day.
So, the result though is by the time I've got something, it's been worked over so many times that although I do make changes as the end, often by the time I've gotten it, it's pretty much completed.
