miscellany

I must say that while poems of “the moment” occasionally can be pulled off without revision, they are rare in my experience, though I’m happy for the few that have occurred like that. And it all depends on what we mean by “the moment.” If the moment includes, say, an imaginative premise that keeps leading to discovered language, then, yes, many poems can take immediate flight that way. But if you mean the poem that originates from some big event in your life, well, too many poets are wedded to such events, and their poems are often constricted by that kind of allegiance.

I would say that if you don’t distort the original experience in some way you may be in compositional trouble. I’ve come to realize that the poem is more important than the experience that triggered the poem. You need to realize that no reader cares about your life, or should care. In the making of many of my poems, even ones that seem very personal, I’ve distorted many things. I have a fidelity to the credible, not necessarily the actual.