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I don’t think I write through transition periods. What happens to me is that something stops, something ends, something is brought to a closure. Then I have nothing—I’ve used up whatever it is that I had and must wait for the well to fill up again. That’s what you tell yourself, but it doesn’t feel like a sanguine experience of sitting quietly while the well fills up. It seems like an experience of desolation, loss, even a kind of panic. The thing you would wish to be doing, you can’t do. I’ve been through a lot of those periods, and what seems to happen, or what has happened in the past, is that after a year or two, or whatever the duration, another sound emerges—and it really is another sound. It’s another way of thinking about a poem or making a poem, a different kind of speech to use, from the Delphic to the demotic. Suddenly I’ll hear a line—you can’t hear this yourself when I read, because my voice tends to pasteurize everything—suddenly I’ll realize that I’m being sent some sort of message, a new path, and I try it on. That’s how things change for me—it’s never that I work my way through it. I have friends, great poets, who seem to make extraordinary use of a daily ritualized writing practice, but for me that doesn’t work at all.
Oh, I don’t think of that as truth but as literal occurrence. Truth, to me, is that which lives within experience. Sometimes you’re working from things that have happened to you in life, but you realize that it would have more force if someone other than you were speaking. Exactly transcribed lived experience will not always make the best poem possible, partly because your conclusions about what you’ve already lived are made before you start writing. What you want to have happen is that on the page you discover something. That’s when the electricity comes, so you invent stories in order to come upon discoveries, insights you haven’t yet had. That’s what I believe in.
I became quite obsessed. There was a period of two years when I read nothing but gardening catalogues. I really thought my life as a poet was over. Then I wrote The Wild Iris (1992), a book in which flowers speak. I could see that a lot of the prose from the catalogues came into the poems. One of the things I feel most strongly—and that book taught it to me—is that you have to allow yourself your obsessions. You can’t decide they’re not literary enough, or not elevated enough. I mean, it’s not that I had given myself permission to read the catalogues, but it was all I could put my mind to. I realized subsequently that this was the catalyst for a book that seemed to me at the time the best thing I’d written—it doesn’t now, but it did then.
Lately, I’ve been watching a whole lot of television, and I’m sure it will get into my work—maybe not the fact of its being television, or maybe that too, I don’t know, but the point is that I don’t feel I have a choice. You must trust that impulse in yourself, because your work is going to come out of what absorbs you. Your work is not going to come out of things you decide should absorb you.
I hate that kind of vocabulary, because it presumes that there should be an uninterrupted fluency. Block is not a word I would use, because I think there is a necessity to be still sometimes and let life happen to you, to let your manner of being in the world be changed by what happens to you so that you will have a different self out of which to write and different news to tell from that space. I’m unhappy, mostly, when I’m not writing, unless I’ve just written something, in which case I’m euphoric because I don’t have to try and write something again, but the fact of being not happy doesn’t mean that I think that I can put an end to it. I think it’s an ordeal I have to live through. I feel kind of pious about this. I keep records of what I write—I started doing this in the sixties—and I can see in my little charts that there were these years when nothing was written, an X for every month, and then when something was written it was so different from the last thing written two years before. I don’t think I could have gotten to that doing busywork for two years. I think I got there because I shut up and waited. I could be wrong—maybe that’s not why I got there and maybe I would have gotten there faster—but my sense of my experience is that you have to wait out certain nadirs. You just wait them out, and if you continue to want to write, you’ll write, and if you stop wanting to write then you’ll have a small gift, and it’s just as well to be informed of that.