Well, Maryann, as I think everyone has acknowledged, each of us works in his or her own way. Even so, I disagree when you say that “I think we have to assume that there is a sensation the poet wants to recreate in the reader by means of the words”, though it may be your phrasing I disagree with. Or perhaps your phasing. But why do we have to assume this? In the case of most (of all?) of my own poems, I have at the start no specific sensation I want to recreate in the reader. Writing a poem strikes me as an opaque and largely exploratory process. Somewhere along the line, the poem seems to discover for itself where it might go. Where it might go includes both form and meaning, to use those terms rather broadly.
In my own practice there is a doubleness involved: I am at once the writer of the poem and its first reader and critic. I am aware that my attention constantly switches back and forth between those two modes – writer/reader-critic. The writer in me is trying to discover the poem by moving the verbal material about into different patterns and drawing in new matter; the reader in me is constantly reviewing this process and urging the writer to look again at what has emerged so far or perhaps to go off in a quite different direction. For me it would only be a long way into this process – hence my word “phasing” above – that your remark might begin to be relevant. At a late stage – at what I have learnt to recognize as a late stage – the writer begins to fall silent and the reader-critic comes to the fore. This can be a dangerous moment, one where yet another part of my mind has to say, “Stop. Let go. Walk away”.
At which point I shall, I think, follow my own advice....
All the best!
Clive
|