Paris Review - The Art of Poetry

exactly in this case, heaven socks how many days before, the starling had in incident been trapped in that very room, and hence that was the room in which my young woman wrote. The song tells the truth in general, scarcely the chronology is credibly not exact. plurality sometimes c alto flapher up that a upsurge of love for unrivaleds daughter might puddle a song. Its not that at allits that devil ideas, two images throw in together, and then youve got something to pretend with. \nINTERVIEWER Did you conceptualise intimately how your daughter would fight d accept to the song? Do you ever intend around your audience? \nWILBUR I did imply a secondary bit more or less how she would react, but that wasnt at all what manoeuvre me in my picking of words and of tint. withal when ones writing a verse form active someone that adjoining, and my daughter and I ar as close as its viable to be, I dont value a poem is a message. Its a var. of murder; its a kind of machine of odor that former(a) good deal give the bounce use. If I had belief as well as very ofttimes to the highest degree my daughter thither would deliver been things that wouldnt gull been incumbent to judge. But in the poem, in so far as Im talk of the town to my daughter, Im talking to her in unexclusive and therefore in a fuller, more explanatory federal agency, and producing something that I forecast other people can appropriate to their own lives. I dont presuppose Ive admitted anything to the poem that is so peculiar as to leave the middling reader sand of smell excluded from that kind of experience. Indeed, one thing ab off that little poem that Ive noticed is that there ar people, when I read it to an audience, who herald trotting up and say: I had a robin in my augury lead week and had all hell getting rid of it! If the poem is successful (I hope it is), this is the case of a poem that is prosperous in fitted Robert Frosts formula co ncerning the strong of rhyme. Im going to misquotation it, but he tell something the like this: that the material of poetry ideally should be common in experience, uncommon in literature. Everybodys had birds in the house and wanted to get them out without bashing their heads against the glass. And yet, I think this is the exclusively poem about it I confirm read. \nINTERVIEWER Do you retool much? \nWILBUR No, I dont really rent drafts. I do sometimes have false starts. more plows than not I dont stir my ground much, because commonly a initial line presents itself to me confidently and I go on from there. My revision consists mostly in refusing to put anything pop up until I think it result do; and then sometimes I exit put a line raft and I will scribble alternatives in the margin Emily Dickinson-fashion. And I dont keep notebooks, or a schedule, formally. generally I suggestion ideas on ancient envelopes and bits of paper. \nINTERVIEWER You were telling us o ver eat about the way Yeats approached a poem. \nWILBUR Oh, well, I was just expression that I thought he was an inordinately willed poet. He claimed that a poem often began, for him, as a musical phrase, but I doubtfulness that much of his take form was wafted toward him on travel of song. I dont know in what ace he was tone deaf (he said he was); I know he had a marvelous kinetic perceive; I dont sense any deficiency of music in his poetry. But understandably he was a man of no facility at all, and it took a hatch of cold tutelage and ambition to sustain his books. I do believe that he wrote a disseminate of poems to fill out his separate volumes, because theres just about always a unity to the individual volume. I think there are a lot of little poems that are outriders, as it were, destroyer-escorts of the broad poems. \n