Jorie Graham on Composing Poetry

VIDEO DESCRIPTION

Poet Jorie Graham tells us how she composes poetry. She compares writing composing poetry with music.

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Jorie Graham on Composing Poetry bigthink composing routine poems jorie graham poems music process composing poems writing poemsJorie Graham on Composing Poetry

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

How do you compose?
I start with the music. Although, my most recent book is a book in which the apparent subject matter is the imagination - I want to put it this way that my most recent book is a book that is extensively and in reality, written for our future people trying to describe what it was like to live now.

What it was to like to have water, what rain was like -- if you took it for granted, there is a probably that you didn't even notice it, what it was like to have seasons and how astonishing the sharp definition is between the end of one season and the beginning of another. It's a book filled with uncanny, unnerving moments where blossoms emerge at radically the wrong time of the year.

On one level, I am writing the book in order for - in order that I myself might come to terms with what that feels like. I know how wrong it is to encounter blossoms in a radically wrong season and that the tree is being completely -- is losing its capacity to endure the transformations in the climate. On the other hand, I don't know unless I write the poem what that feels like.

And there is a very great difference between what that means and what that implies and what it feels, but it's only if I can get myself and hopefully a reader to experience what it feels like. Then that someone might feel that, that sensation would lead them to change the way they feel about these issues and existence. As long as they remain conceptual issues, they are things as I said before you can push into the margins and push through your without feeling that they need to take precedence over your identity defining life.

On the other hand, although the book is very devoted to this subject, the book began in a moment where I had written for a very long time and I accidentally wrote on a piece of paper, a piece of music that I had never written before. It happened to be a very long line combined with a very short line that moved back again into a very long line. I realized I was using the long line of Whitman and the short line of Williams and that I was suddenly dealing with the inherited music of two poets devoted to both the social issues of their time and to the ideas inherent in the American Democratic project.

So suddenly, I was dealing with two very different musics that had contented with democracy. At the same time, I had a piece of music I had never heard before, it was thrilling and it happened to be a small passage in a poem that I discarded about - we are trying to describe water crossing down a hillside, and the way in which it moved suddenly was able to come into the foreground because of this alternation of a long and a short line which I had never tried before.

And so to be completely honest as a maker, I would say, I wanted to write in that music and explore everything that music could do - 11 books into this, it was a piece of music I had - it was a gold mine. I was completely thrilled by the fact that there was a whole other kind of music that I didn't even know existed that I was capable of engaging, exploring, using, developing, when William says," A new music is a new mind."

This is precisely what he is referring to. At a certain point, you realize that if you change the way in which you are preceding musically, you will move out of the experiences that you already know you know, and begin to have emotions and therefore perhaps thoughts and certainly, intimations or even visions of things that you had no access to except via that music. So I begin with the music and I take the music everywhere that I can in the book, revising endlessly. I mean I must revise every poem 40, 50 times and basically, the book has to be wrenched from me in order to get published because I would keep revising it, but at the same time, when I have worked out everything that music can do, the book is over.

And, I then had entered a new silence which is quite frankly, unbearable, waiting for a new music to present itself and it does so in a very mysterious way that I can't describe, except by saying, one waits. Roethke says, "A lively understandable spirit once entertained you, be still, wait, it will come again." So it's that kind of waiting that keeps causing negative capability, the capacity to - he says, follows that by saying without erodible reaching after a fact and reason, you can't reach for the poem. You have to in some way, wait for it to present  itself as why we have all these notions like inspiration and the music is speaking to one, you do wait for a poem when it begins to -- the music begins to awaken and bring it towards you. Then technique is what you use in order to engage it and to have -- a poem, after all is a conversation you are having via technical means via a forum and the musical devices of all kinds, with a subject.

I once had a great teacher Donald Justice (ph) who said to me, in a conference when I was student, "Damn it, Jorie, you have to learn to give in to the destructiveness of the subject." And I thought what that does mean. And then, few years later, walking across the street, I stood in the middle of an intersection I realized, "I know what he means." He means that the subject will destroy any intentions you had for it going in to the encounter with it and if it doesn't destroy any intentions that you have, then you are just writing what you want to be true or what you wish to be true and you are not being changed by your encounter with the poem.

And then you run into what Yates calls 'Work of will, instead of work of imagination.'