Volume 24 109
the greatest single achievement of American litera-
ture, and I adore the short work of Poe, Cheever,
Hemingway, O’Connor, Faulkner, Porter, Welty,
Malamud, and Carver—though I would award
Chekhov top international honors in the form.
Philosophers and theologians like St. Augustine,
Albert Schweitzer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Thomas
Merton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Miguel de Unamuno,
Mircea Eliade, Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Maritain,
and Georg Lukacs have all been important to me.
Who have been your mentors? What influence
have they had on your professional and personal life?
I have moved around a great deal in my adult
life and changed my profession three times—from
academies to business to writing. No one person
served as a mentor across all those changes, but at
particular points in my life certain people had a cru-
cial influence. The older writers who helped me the
most—not so much in terms of external assistance
but in internal clarification—were Robert Fitzgerald,
Elizabeth Bishop, Donald Davie, Howard Moss,
and Fredrick Morgan. Each helped me in a differ-
ent way sometimes just for a short but critical pe-
riod. There have also been some important
relationships with older writers who were not so
much mentors as dear friends—like Donald Justice,
John Haines, Daniel Hoffman, X. J. Kennedy,
William Jay Smith, Janet Lewis, William Maxwell,
and Anne Stevenson.
What influence have these mentors had on you?
They provided useful models of what a writer’s
life might be like. Their work also kept my standards
high. Each relationship was necessarily different.
Elizabeth Bishop, for example, encouraged me,
whereas Donald Davie discouraged me. Both inter-
ventions helped me develop as a writer. Robert
Fitzgerald taught me essential things about poetic
craft. He also provided me with a model of a modern
Catholic man of letters. Frederick Morgan quietly
encouraged me to write in my own way. I should
also add that these writers were all remarkable
human beings. Knowing them confirmed my sense
of the importance of friendship, generosity, and
integrity in literary life.
Do you compose a poem in longhand or on a
computer? What is the reason for your choice? Do
you think the electronic age has helped or hindered
creative writing?
My methods are quite primitive. My poems be-
gin as words in the air. I talk to myself—usually
while pacing the room or walking outside. (Any
observer would assume I was mad.) After I coax a
line or two aloud, I jot it down. Very slowly and
painstakingly I shape those lines and phrases into
a poem. I pay equal attention to the way the poem
sounds and how it works on the page. Only after
many handwritten drafts do I type the poem up.
That transition allows me to see the poem differ-
ently and revise it further. Since I believe that po-
etry not only originates in the body but also
communicates largely through physical sound, I am
skeptical of the putative advances of the electronic
age. Though computers offer great convenience,
they cannot substitute for direct physical embodi-
ment of one’s medium.
Mark Twain, famous for his prose style, once
said, “The difference between the right word and
the nearly right word is the difference between
lightning and a lightning bug.” How do you know
when you have the found the “right” word for a
poem?
This is an excellent question because so often
the expressive effect of a line or stanza depends
upon a single word. In poetry no effect is too small
to matter. I revise a great deal and often focus on
a particular word or phrase which I instinctively
feel is crucial to the poem’s impact. I like to com-
bine words in a way that initially seems slightly
odd but also oddly appropriate. I hope to discover
a new combination that the language was waiting
to have happen.
When you begin work on a poem, what is your
method? Do you have the poem, or the concept of
the poem, in its entirety in your mind before you
set it down in words, or is writing the poem a
process of discovery?
My poetic method is best described as confu-
sion, followed by madness, exhilaration, and de-
spair. I advise others to avoid my conspicuously bad
example. For me, a poem begins as a powerful phys-
ical sensation. I can feel the poem in my throat and
temples—a sudden illumination that is mostly be-
yond words but which is also partially embodied in
a few specific words. That line or phrase suddenly
opens a doorway. I usually have no idea what theThe LitanyTo understand
a poem it helps to have
lived at least a little of
its contents.”