I still take a lot of notes, but I think I allow myself more time to be receptive to the world, as opposed to always worrying about saying something. I’ll sometimes go months without writing, which is not something I used to do. Over the past eight years, one thing that’s different is that I take longer breaks. I am curious, though, for someone who has been doing this for some time now, has your process changed much over time? Do you always approach making a poem in the same way?
So I may see something one way, and another person could be like, “That’s not at all what happened.” Still, the rudest editor is the one that you encounter before a pen even touches the page, right? The one in your mind that says, “No, you can’t write about that.”Īll writers get asked questions like, “How do you work? Do you work in the morning? Do you work at night? Do you use a certain kind of ink pen? Do you have rituals around writing?” As if by answering you’re giving them the key that would maybe unlock their own process. Also, I’m very aware that there are two sides to every story. I want to make sure that I’m not stepping on anyone’s toes. It’s harder for me if it’s about anyone else. So I thought maybe that meant I was supposed to create this book. There aren’t a lot of poems about some of these things I was experiencing-not even a lot of essays or memoirs either. I guess I could have chosen not to publish them, but it felt like once I had written them it would be wrong not to share them. Writing is how I make sense of the world, so it would be hard not to write the poems. I didn’t know how to really process what I was going through in my own personal life without just writing about it. I always want to make work that matters, even if it’s just to myself. You’ve always written about personal things in your work, but the poems in The Carrying feel even more intimate, particularly the poems about trying to conceive a child. And so this new book was just me trying to go a little further. I’m competing with my myself, right? I appreciate all the work I’ve written so far, but I’m always trying to push myself. And that’s not much different from how I usually feel. But other than that, I really just wanted to do good work. Mostly there was just the sense that I wanted to honor that connection with people who had been drawn to Bright Dead Things. Like, “Oh, people may read this.” There was that.
Then after Bright Dead Things, there is a little bit of a pressure. Instead, I think about a reader, the person I am trying to communicate with, but I don’t have the idea that a lot of people are ever going to read anything.
Did that create a certain amount of pressure going forward? Your last book, Bright Dead Things, was a finalist for the National Book Award.
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