The work I’ve done in translation, or writing essays, for example, is just labor. You get in and you do it, though the getting in can be prolonged agony. With poems, if I have a deadline—like I told my editor, Dan Halpern, that I’m going to get a book ready, so I know he needs a finished manuscript by a certain time—then I can get down to work in a forced march and say, Okay, I’m going to spend x number of hours a day and wrestle with these things and muscle through all my hesitations and get the poems into shape. There’s a part of me that wants to let problems go for a while, let a piece of writing simmer and percolate, in the hope that my unconscious will take care of it. That the solution will come. And I think that’s useful up to a point, but I also think you come back to the basic thing about writing. You’ve got to exercise your will and get work done. You’ve got to show the muse you’re willing to show up, whether anything is happening or not. But in another way I’ve been such a bad model, as far as work ethic, because of my ox-like tendencies. A lot of that labor went into prose and translation. Sometimes I would be in the middle of writing an essay on Ernesto Cardenal or on what’s going on in Chinese poetry, but I’d be thinking, Why don’t I just shut up and try to write a poem?