Why Write?

The Green Mountains Review has a series called "Why Write?" in which various writers are invited to answer that very question.

Here is a sampling of the reasons given by poet Stephen Dunn in his December 2011 response to "Why Write?"

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It’s how I translate experience, and invent it. Both. It’s what I do when I go to my room. To go to my room.

Though I usually write in the first person, to be disinterested in self.

To have an allegiance to the poem more than any moment in it.

To get the poem in motion so that it might seem to move on its own. To be aware that the ear finds the next moment as much as my sense of purpose does. To doubt the smartest thing I find myself saying. To love the shape of a sentence as much, maybe more, than the content it bears. To take myself as seriously as the most serious artist I can imagine.

To worry when the poem seems to find its essence. That is, to worry that I’ll execute what I’ve just learned about my poem. Time, then, to give it wings.

To remember that a poem is always a compromise between the drift of language already employed and my willfulness.

What I said about play and discovery aside, most poems, in my experience, are worried into existence. Let them run wild, then make them behave.

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And that's just a sampling. Check out the entire essay for more.

Not Dunn Yet

Station WCHE (from West Chester, PA, only minutes by car from where I grew up) comes this podcast interview with poet Stephen Dunn, by host Steven Brodsky on The Entertainment and Culture Show.

Dunn talks about how when writing in the first person, he tries to be bored with himself but to choose topics that interest him. He also says, "I'm not into a poem until the first moment I 've startled myself, till I say something I didn't know I could say. Then I feel I could go further. But I'm not interested in poem as autobiography at all, even though collectively one can see a life. I would think one could make certain assumptions about my life, I suspect."

Another recurring point of discussion is how often the last lines of a poem get juxtaposed with a stronger line from a previous draft, or replaced entirely. He gives examples, which is quite useful as a craft point.

When asked how he has been able to be so prolific and yet keep so fresh, Dunn mentions a book of essays currently being compiled about his work, as written by other prominent contemporary poets. "I haven't known what I was doing for years, and maybe that's why I can keep going forward. Right now there's a danger of somebody describing to me very accurately, it seems, what I do in poems, and the impulse to do that again is very strong, once you know what you're doing."

His discussions of the costs and payoffs of writing poetry, "giving over your whole life," is something that anyone who wants to be a serious poet should consider. (This discussion comes just past the 20-minute mark of the podcast.)

Interestingly, he refers to the revision process as "your coldest eye." 

"You need to think of yourself as makers rather than as utterers, and if you do, there's a chance you may find something that's your own," he says in part of his response about how he encourages students to find their own voices (which he finds less important than staying limber as an artist: "I don't encourage them to find their voices, I encourage them to take themselves seriously, as other artists do. Poets are famous for being happy with their feelings, and very few other artists think that way. If you want to be a dancer, you have to be limber.")

He closed the podcast by reading "If a Clown," which you can enjoy here.