Let’s answer Malcolm Davidson’s questions as they apply to my poetry today. The process I’m describing here applies specifically to my prose poems. Since I’m not working on a verse project at the moment – save at the very end stage of typing up VOG – this is the “current” work.

 

In recent years, I’ve tended to switch the notebooks in which I first write my draft sentences away from Rhodia Bloc pocket cubes to electronic personal digital assistants. I first had a Sharp personal organizer with a Qwerty keyboard and a tiny screen – I used this for about four years before switching over to my current Palm Pilot (by now an aging M500). I use the memo function of the Pilot and write – using the Palm stylus & the Graffiti letter recognition program that Rae Armantrout tells me must be like learning a new language (my own sense is, no, it’s more like learning a new alphabet, albeit one very close to our own) – wherever I happen to be. Within the past few days, this has included the Poetry & Empire retreat, the reading at the Institute for Contemporary Art – where I read one fragment of Zyxt that was then less than 20 minutes old – as well as while waiting for somebody to come & give my ’91 Mazda a jump start (Greg Djanikian beat out AAA) and while sitting with Gil Ott in the hospital. I don’t ride buses much any more – Chester County is definitely not public transit friendly – but the habits of writing that I first learned in San Francisco of writing as I move about the day & city still apply. One advantage of the Palm Pilot I’ve found is that I can – and sometimes do – write during business meetings on my job. Even though I seldom spend more than a minute per day doing that, I often find these to be very productive minutes. Often in a meeting I will use an add-on keyboard that snaps onto the bottom of the Palm Pilot, so I really am typing as I write.

 

I don’t begin to think about putting these initial “raw” sentences together until I have a fair number of them – I think of 150 as a good number – from which to select. When I do I will sit down with a notebook chosen especially for & dedicated to a specific project. For Zyxt, it is a giant leather-bound journal that I bought at a high-end stationary store at the King of Prussia Mall a few years back. My general practice here is to go through my set of raw notes and compose a section that usually employs no more than a third of what I’ve originally written. I delete them from the Pilot as I use them – as well as deleting others that I now realize I will never use – so that when the new section of the work is done, it may use only 50 or so sentences, but I am apt to be “down” as many as 65 sentences in my “sentence bank.” As I write these sentences into the notebook, I do make a fair number of revisions, mostly because of the contexts into which I’m placing them.

 

For the past twenty years, as I’ve noted here before, I’ve used the same Waterman pen, modified to use to fine point black felt tip cartridge, in these notebooks.

 

Most often I work in the notebooks in my basement office at home, sitting in a wooden school desk that I bought from a pricey private school in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights when it was recycling its stock of desks. It’s very much the kind of desk I sat in when I was a kid & I find that deeply comforting – I find that I trust my instincts writing the more they replicate how I felt while writing when I was, say, ten years old. When I do this, I never have music on and often my wife & kids are all out of the house, so I have total solitude. One exception to this that has occurred in the composition of Zyxt is that for awhile my son Jesse was taking Saturday morning violin lessons and I would drop him off at his teacher’s house then proceed to a baseball field out near the Great Valley Industrial Park, a field that for some reason is not used by any of the local little league teams in the area even though it’s fairly new & in excellent shape. I would take out the notebook & work at a picnic bench.

 

I don’t proceed from the notebook to the final typescript until the notebook is complete. In many projects, that also means that the notebook is full. I’ve been known to go a couple of years before typing anything up – I find that it makes sense to have some distance on what’s in the notebook. I do make more revisions at this stage, but they tend to be of the fine-tuning variety – sometimes just grammatical corrections that suddenly jump out at me as necessary. During this stage, I do sometimes have music on in my office, usually jazz or world music. Somehow the physical process of interacting with screen & keyboard permits using the tension I feel between the rhythm of sentences – I type at around 40 words per minute at this stage, not the fastest I can go, but much faster than I do at either the Palm Pilot or notebook stages – and the rhythms of music.

 

After this there is one more important stage in the writing process: using this text in a reading, both to test how it comes across with an audience and to catch typos in my manuscript itself. While I’ve been known to send works to journals before I use them in a reading, I’m far less apt to do this with sending works to publishers for books.

 

So even though I think of myself as a “first thought-best thought” kind of guy, the accumulation of any given page of poetry usually takes me six or seven years from the initial note to the completed poem. Which means, for instance, that I am nowhere near being done with any text that I’ve begun since I first started blogging in August of last year.