STYLE CHOSE ME

How did I choose a form that provided the best structure, style, and tone for the poems I write? Good question. Always a good question. The honest answer is that I don’t think I chose a style at all. And I’m not going to reverse the usual formulation and say that the style chose me. That sounds clever, but it isn’t really true either.What happened was less deliberate and, I think, more useful. I wrote. I tried different ways of writing. I imitated poets I admired. I wrote bad poems, naïve poems, self-indulgent poems, poems that were much too pleased with themselves. I wrote poems that sounded like somebody else because, at the time, I hadn’t yet figured out what sounded like me.There is always something slightly suspect about an artist explaining his or her own process. It can make the whole business sound more calculated than it really is, as if the poet sits down with a set of instructions and consciously manufactures a poem. I don’t work that way. I don’t begin with a theory of poetry, decide on a form, and then fill it with appropriate material. I generally don’t know exactly where I’m going. But I’ve learned something about how to get there.

For me, style was an accumulation of choices made over a long period of time. I gradually discovered what I didn’t want: too much decoration, too much explanation, too much obvious significance, too much of the poet standing in front of the poem announcing how important it was. I became increasingly interested in language that could be direct without being simple, strange without being obscure, and suggestive without explaining itself to death.That meant learning to trust the material. An image didn’t always need to symbolize something. A line didn’t have to announce its importance. Sometimes a poem could simply put two things next to each other and let the tension between them do the work. I became less interested in producing a recognizable “poetic” effect and more interested in finding the right arrangement of words, images, rhythms, and interruptions.

So I suppose what I arrived at was a habit of compositional mind rather than a particular style or form. The poems became, ideally, less pretentious, more direct, more honest. Not necessarily more autobiographical or confessional, but less interested in pretending to know more than I actually knew. I learned to let uncertainty remain uncertainty.A friend, Paul Dresman, who recently passed away and was himself one of the best poets I ever had the pleasure to know, helped me understand this. Paul insisted that revision was not an afterthought but a central part of the craft. Poetry was an art, he reminded me, no less than painting, music, sculpture, or any other form of composition. The poem on the page was not necessarily the poem you had written first. It was the poem you discovered through revision.

That distinction became important to me. I had assumed, as many beginning writers probably do, that the most exciting thing in a poem was also likely to be the most important. Paul taught me to be suspicious of that assumption. Sometimes the line you love most is the line that has to go. Sometimes the cleverest image is getting in the way. Sometimes what seems like the poem’s great idea is precisely what is keeping the poem from becoming a poem.

Revision, then, became less a matter of correcting mistakes than of removing interference. You take away what is unnecessary until the images, sounds, associations, and ideas that actually belong to the poem have room to exist. The goal isn't to make the poem more impressive. It is to make it more itself.That process is still going on. I don’t think a poet ever finally arrives at a style and locks the door behind him. You keep writing, keep failing, keep disc
overing things, and occasionally you stumble onto something that feels right. You recognize it because it doesn't seem manufactured. It has its own necessity.

So how did I choose the form, structure, style, and tone of my poems?