[David Rosenthal]

Richard Hugo, in The Triggering Town, wrote:

Originally Posted by Richard Hugo

You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second.

I mostly agree with this. Even when I am only working on one poem, I am most likely working on several. What is most important -- which is the actual point Hugo is trying to make in the section from which I clipped the quote -- is that you are writing something. Anything. Which is shockingly easier said than done.

David R.

[Charlotte Innes]

Heavens, David! Your Richard Hugo quote.... This has happened to me so often, I was beginning to think that this was my method--write a rather mediocre or even awful poem first, and then the next one seeming to build on that and be better. And yes, sometimes the second one often does come more easily, but not always.

I've never done this consciously, but clearly the mind knows its own mind, or its unconscious mind.

Charlotte

[Janice D. Soderling]

clearly the mind knows its own mind, or its unconscious mind.

Truer words were never spoken, Charlotte!

I've been trying to answer this question, but I don't know the answer. At present I am not writing poetry at all. I used to write a poem a day, more or less, and worry it like a dog worries a bone until I was statisfied with it. That usually took a day, off and on, and a gazillion drafts. Or sometimes you get one for free, ready made like Athena from Zeus' head.

Or sometimes I rediscover one that never worked, perhaps years later, and know at once what I can do with it. There might be only one good line for salvaging, and that ain't so bad. There are sites that want "one good line". Ink | Blink, for example.

Sometimes I find it was ready and raring to go and I didn't know it so I send it off to a better place and it never returns except to show off its new home.

Sometimes the best thing to do is pretend it's a doughnut or a code cipher and you are at war, the enemy is at the gates--dunk it in a cup of hot chocolate, chew and swallow. No incriminating evidence, you know.

Not to be confused with the memorable advice once given me by John Riley, "You can dip a turd in chocolate, but it isn't advisable to eat it."

Keep those latter two bits of advice compartmentalized.

[David Rosenthal]

Originally Posted by Charlotte Innes

Heavens, David! Your Richard Hugo quote.... This has happened to me so often, I was beginning to think that this was my method--write a rather mediocre or even awful poem first, and then the next one seeming to build on that and be better. And yes, sometimes the second one often does come more easily, but not always.

I've never done this consciously, but clearly the mind knows its own mind, or its unconscious mind.

Charlotte

Nothing ever really comes easily to me, but some more easily than others, I suppose. The real point of this passage in the Hugo book is a pitch to practice craft and write regularly so that, indeed, the mind will come to its own mind. Here, I'll zoom out a little:

Originally Posted by Richard Hugo from "The Triggering Town"

Once a spectator said, after Jack Nicklaus had chipped a shot in from a sand trap, "That's pretty lucky." Nicklaus is supposed to have replied, "Right. But I notice the more I practice, the luckier I get." If you write often, perhaps every day, you will stay in shape and will be better able to receive those good poems, which are finally a matter of luck, and get them down. Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don't work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing wild come. Get to work.

David R.

[Susan McLean]

I usually work on just one poem at a time, but if an idea for another comes to me while the poem is still in progress, I jot down some notes on it so that I don't lose the idea entirely. I used to find that my most urgent ideas for poems would come to me right when I had a huge stack of papers or exams to grade. Now I am getting better at deferring the poem until later, but it does mean I write less when I am teaching. I procrastinate less and write less. When I save poems for later, they often don't catch fire in quite the same way they do when the heat of inspiration is fresh. But some poems are always going to peter out midway or turn out to be duds, no matter when I write them.

Susan

[Charlotte Innes]

David, about the rest of the Hugo quote and your comment:

The real point of this passage in the Hugo book is a pitch to practice craft and write regularly so that, indeed, the mind will come to its own mind.

YES! And yes, again. This idea about process is what gets me through months of crap...

And now I think about it, this is what I tell students when they think they're terrible writers... To keep going... Well, now I can also use this quote. So thank you!

Susan, about your comment: ....I procrastinate less.... I agree, one shouldn't wait. But what I find increasingly is that poems don't just come on the whole. They arise out of all the bits and pieces I jot down in my notebook. For me, it's crucial to write down any pinging thought that comes into my head--I mean thoughts that seem to have a little buzz about them. Often I don't know what they mean, but they go down on the page. And some of them come together later in a poem--and some don't.

It's all practice and process....

Charlotte