Scott: I sometimes talk about writing as being like building a house. One goes to many places to gather raw materials; examines the work of others to get ideas, etc. I don’t know if that helps me write, but it helps me explain to others how I go about my business. Carolee: At my house, before eating anything I've cooked, my kids eye the food suspiciously and ask, "Was there a recipe?" Usually, I answer, "Well, sort of." That means they'll be eating what we affectionately refer to as my "concoctions." I think my poems are like this, too. I experiment. I play. I rarely know what's going to go into them. Geordie: I think of a poem as an uncarved block, much as a sculptor might view a chunk of marble. My uncarved block is the mass of words that adhere to a particular idea, and my task is to find the poem within. I find the best way to do that is to sift the words as they reveal themselves naturally, and hew off the extraneous along the way. C. Albert: My first draft is like a skeleton. I write fast, and it has good bones, but almost always needs a lot of fleshing out; the hard part. Hunting for the right words is fun, like clothes shopping without leaving my couch. Tom: Sometimes I think of writing a poem as breathing the letters together, as one does in writing out letterforms in the practice of calligraphy.
Do you ever use handcrafting activities as a route to generate poetry? For example, does a spell of knitting help you gather your ideas?
Karla: I wouldn’t call it handcrafting, but photography is certainly an artistic endeavor I constantly use to open the floodgates to poetry. There’s considerable crafting involved in composing a photograph, such as aperture settings, framing of the shot, considerations of light and shadow, ISO speed. . . . But perhaps the most important aspect of crafting a photograph is my eye’s search for the significant detail — what will the focal point be? This search, repeated again and again, trains the eye, which in turn trains the mind to create concrete details in my poems. One creative act leads to another. I’ve also learned through photography how much akin is cropping a photograph to trimming excess words or lines from a poem. Ted: It never occurred to me before your suggestion, but you are quite right: When I have framed a bit of remodeling, or built a rock wall, or planted some rhodies, the residual sense of handicraft does seem to lend stimulus and order to my writing.