Extracts Interview

Three Questions from Extracts: Your Daily Dose of Lit, January 18, 2014.

According to your bio you practiced law for quite a while before deciding to focus on poetry. It seems, however, that legal writing (and speaking for that matter) might be a poetry of its own. Is there an art to creating a legal voice, and how is it different from or similar to creating your poetic voice?

Several years ago I took a master class with a wonderful teacher. In our individual conference she took note of my legal background and said, You know, we get the point early on. You really don't have to hammer it home. Aha! Like a teenager leaving home I had to separate, and to transform years of writing habits to find my poetic voice.

Legal writing is basically advocacy. Briefs, memos and even letters marshal facts to make a case. Good legal writing is tough, didactic, convincing, and certainly an art. Not that over the years I never smiled. I have often quoted one defendant's responsive papers that accusingly said, The plaintiff's argument does not hold fruit. Is that poetry? Perhaps it depends on the fruit.

For me, writing poetry is a very different experience. As Louis Simpson wrote, I want a poem to be beyond me. I want it to be something that transfers a feeling I don't quite understand the limits of.

It took me years to alter habits. I began working on my relationship with the other side of my brain, letting mystery and intimacy come through.

Happily the process of harnessing words (better known as revision) hooked me. I rarely feel a poem is finished. There always seems to be a better word or line break. In that sense legal writing and poetry have a lot in common.

Harnessing words is such an interesting way to think about revision. How long do you need to let your poems be wild before you can allow yourself to rein them in? How do you approach revision in general? One poem at a time? One line at a time? One word at a time?

I revisit my poems often and erratically. I keep my work on the Google cloud. Each time I revise, an automatic backup is saved. (Do I sound like an ad? Rest assured, I have no stock). It surprises me how many revisions even the smallest poem has endured over time (occasionally, even after they have been published).

Keeping one's distance is tough, but falling in love with one's own words skews judgment. Revisiting a poem after a day or a year, can bring a disquieting but useful change in perspective. Painful as it may be, one has to be willing to hit delete and try something new.

Then of course there is the adventure of discovering what your poem is about. As I revise, a poem often reveals itself as something quite different than what I originally thought. I have to laugh when I finish a piece, take it to my poetry workshop of intelligent writers, and no one gets it! Following protocol I sit quietly as the poem is discussed. Whose work are they talking about? How could they not understand what is so obvious? Eventually, I realize that somewhere in these carefully placed words is a poem imprisoned, waiting to be freed.

It seems you have established quite a solid relationship with that other side of your brain because the one thing that is quite striking about your work is its intimacy. Your poems offer private moments and thoughts, but as a reader I never feel as though I'm trespassing. How do you know when you opened up just enough?

Sharon Olds does it easily. I struggle, but as I age I care less what people think. I certainly don't start with an agenda. I am a writer of mostly narrative poems which tend to be personal and so I have had to deal with overcoming the discomfort of writing about intimate subjects.

Mining one's life for a sliver of insight, joy or sorrow is the stuff of poetry. I don't think I have any set rules about what I will or will not say in a poem. If a poem is personal and intimate I accept its arrival on the page as something of value to be nurtured. There is so much of the process of writing a poem that is unplanned and spontaneous.

What I want from a poem—my own or someone else's—is that it will plow through the clutter of everyday trivia to unearth the examined life that Socrates hinted was worth living.