KARAN

James, thank you so much for these luminous and contemplative poems, and really, for all the books you’ve written so far. As you know, I’m a big fan and consider myself deeply lucky to be in conversation with you. I’m struck by how you create what you’ve called “poems that don’t talk too much, poems to linger and be quiet with.” In “Again,” you write “To have you back / for an hour, oh even / in a room of dream, / and to say / something to change us / back to what we never / quite were.” This attention to the unsaid, to the spaces between words, seems central to your work as a poet and an aphorist. Let’s begin with the process question. How do you approach writing a poem? Do you start with the “drifting and gazing” you’ve mentioned, or does it begin another way? Do you start with an image, a line, or an idea? Do you have a writing routine? And most importantly, what drives you to write poetry?

JAMES

I sit by two windows opening onto a little woods, a green haze of leaves in summer, a sepia haze of branches in winter. And yeah, I “drift and gaze,” unfocusing. My feet are up and there’s a looseleaf in my lap, and probably a book, and many other books within easy reach, and inevitably morning coffee, probably not my first cup. 

There’s no computer at the desk — print is too public and final for this stage. In some moods I even prefer pencil to pen — it feels more possible, more revocable, borderline invisible.

I often end up reading a little, not necessarily anything I love or even know. It’s as if I don’t know what’s on my mind until someone else starts talking. Often I switch books. 

I don’t require myself to write down anything in my hour or two, though I usually do. That might be a word, a line, an image, an idea. Or a revision or continuation of a line, idea or image I came up with days or weeks ago (I don’t look back). Or even a few lines of an opening, though I don’t really “work on it,” don’t push it further than it will go easily. All those things might be on a single looseleaf page, with no sense at all that they’ll end up in the same poem or even the same book.

If that page fills up, I turn it. I probably won’t go back to it for weeks or months, when I’ll have maybe 40 pages to transcribe on the computer. Most of that gets thrown away. The rest gets placed in little clusters that I’m tentatively thinking of as poems. I call them “nebulae” after the gas clouds where stars condense and ignite. (Pretty pretentious, I guess, but I think it’s funny!)

For weeks, months, sometimes even years, these clouds will accumulate notes, alternate versions, additions until it finally seems to me there’s a poem I could finish. Then, for the first time, I bear down on it and push it a little, then a lot. That part requires a different kind of patience, and different skills. It’s challenging and satisfying, but maybe not as essential or as pleasurable as the drifting-and-gazing phase. 

Maybe I’m letting Time write the poems, rather than willing them myself. I don’t know if my method would work for anyone else. It requires a lot of patience (or maybe a lot of avoidance?). Some writers are happier hammering on one poem exclusively until it’s done. If I did that, I think I’d end up sounding too much like myself — I need more Time and Chance to keep out of my ruts. And I’d worry about the poems sounding forced and Productive, like they were mainly written in order to have written a poem, which is deadly.

As to why I write poetry? That feels like a fundamental question, but it’s not something I’ve ever really asked myself or felt like I needed to know. Just as you don’t need to think you know the meaning of life to live it. Though there may be an answer to these questions implicit in how you write or how you live. 

Later in life, the urgencies and rationalizations and ambitions you began with start to feel iffier. Now I sometimes feel that what keeps me going is the drifting and gazing itself, the calm engagement, the sense of slowly figuring something out. I’ve been known to tell people they’re poets if they just sit by the window a couple of hours a week thinking and feeling, no matter if they ever finish a poem, much less publish one. 

KARAN

Your long poems “Essay on Clouds” (my all-time favorite of yours!) and “Essay on Clocks” are masterful explorations of their subjects, moving from observation to metaphysical inquiry. They seem to embody what you’ve described as trying to “settle into what part of Everything is true and essential and touching.” Through careful observation of these everyday phenomena, you build toward profound metaphysical insights, as when you write “Everything / we know well / lightens and escapes us, and isn’t that / when we escape?” How do you approach these longer meditative pieces? Do you find that certain subjects demand this kind of patient unfolding? 

JAMES

Probably the subjects of the essay poems are so simple and general that they don’t seem to need an essay — which makes their titles seem faintly funny? And there’s often something tongue-in-cheek in the poems — some of them I’d call faux-didactic. Who, after all, needs to explain clouds, clocks, stones, salt, flies, sand? But they have lots of resonances in our ordinary life — probably they line up pretty well with the subjects of Neruda’s “Elemental Odes,” which I’ve spent many hours with. 

The poems aren’t, of course, explaining their subjects, nor are they making an argument. Yes, the fun is in looking at things from many angles until you get somewhere that feels like an ending. But it can be really (really) hard to connect the dots in the right order without seeming to force them. When a poem “jumps,” as these characteristically do, it often feels like a leap into the darkness. It can be. But often it’s two already-written thoughts connecting across space in the notebook (intra-cloud lightning?) But even when the connection feels right, there’s still work to be done. Knowing where you’re going can make it even harder to arrive there convincingly. That is, a leaf doesn’t just plummet straight to the ground, thud. By nature it tumbles, twists, sways side to side, lands soundlessly. 

With some of the essay poems, say “On the Fly” and “Epilogue in Stone” (they don’t have to have “essay” in the title, I don’t think) I avoided some of this problem by doing them as section or sequence poems. Then you’re not dealing so much with the hesitations and elaborations of syntax and rhythm as with the contrast/continuity of sections, and it feels like you’re working more spatially, maybe like a collagist or a sculptor or an abstract painter.

KARAN

I didn’t want to overstuff my last question (I’ve been accused of that before) but I also wanted to touch on the “essay” part. You’ve been writing these essay-poems for a while. Why do you refer to these poems as essays? Is it the coming together of the two forms that interest you, the intersection? Or is it because you’re trying to prove a thought as one does in an essay in your poems that you title them this way? When did this begin?

JAMES

“Essay” comes from roots meaning “to try or attempt.” It is in its origin (e.g. Montaigne) wandery and experimental, and the essays we care about still are. Of course there’s a degenerate Freshman Comp version of the essay that concerns itself with “proving a point.” Back in the day, they used to tell us about something they called the Harvard Outline Form: an Intro stating your point, 3 proofs of your point, and a Conclusion that sounded tediously similar to your Intro. But that’s just calisthenics — it won’t yield even an above-average freshman composition. 

I probably got the idea of “essay” as a title for a poem from Pope’s brilliant “Essay on Criticism,” but I was chasing Neruda more than Pope. Not sure when I’d say the essay poems started — depends how strictly you define them and whether you require “essay” in the title. “The Encyclopedia of the Stones,” in my first book, Reservations, might be an early example of the sequencey version of the essay poem — it’s in 66 sections! In Second Guesses there’s an “Essay on Birds,” which is very much like the ones in During and For Now 30-35 years later. And perhaps the title poem of my third book, How Things Are, is my longest one. 

KARAN

Time seems to be a central preoccupation of yours — it appears throughout these poems not just as a theme but as a formal concern. You’ve referred to your aphorisms as “ten-second essays” — the aphorisms themselves embody a liminal space between ephemeral and eternal which is fascinating to me. And “When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang…” explicitly wrestles with time: “But life is a minute, / and suddenly looking up / from the page, who can tell / whether it’s the middle or end / or beginning of a minute?” How does poetry’s unique relationship with time — its ability to freeze moments, circle back, repeat — inform your approach to craft? Or differently put, does writing lend itself better than other artforms to investigate the idea of time? 

JAMES

I guess Time is my theme. If it’s specific enough even to be a theme. If it even exists (a lot of physicists say there’s no such thing).

But as you say, it’s as much a matter of form as theme. I often think of the flow or music of poems — whatever you call the confluence of sounds, rhythm, syntax, rhythm, line-breaking, etc. — as a kind of alternate time or timing, as a way of making time feelable both emotionally and physically (if those are even different). And I feel my poems primarily in something like a half-dozen musical categories. So the two essay poems we’ve been talking about, “Essay on Clouds” and “Essay on Clocks,” are similar in title but seem to me different genres. One is steeply-broken, leapy, short-line free verse, the other is more deliberate, perhaps “some kind of blank verse” (as Bishop says), with higher linear integrity, a blurrier sound and faint half-rhyming. 

Music itself is probably more purely Time. But if you want to say what can only be implicit in music, if you want time to talk about itself, you probably need to write a poem.

KARAN

In “Sentence,” you explore the limitations of language in relation to the divine: “So that’s why prayers don’t work: God doesn’t speak English, / doesn’t speak anything.” I love that so much! How do you see poetry’s relationship to prayer or spiritual inquiry? Also, there’s a school of poetry that believes a poem or a poet can categorize their work in one of these four ways: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, poetry of the soul. Of course all great poets operate from all spaces and I see that in your work completely, but where would you place your work within this framework, if at all? 

JAMES

I’d probably stick with my categorization by flow!

But seriously, big words make me nervous. I don’t think I’ve ever used the word “spiritual,” certainly not about myself or what I do. It seems like a claim, one that I’d feel pretentious making. As for those other four words, I don’t mind them so much, even in poems. “Body” is the one I’m least comfortable with in writing (though obviously it physically underlies all the others) because in a poem it’s not bodily at all — it’s a chunk of unwritten abstraction, and usually faintly preachy. “Soul” is more useful as a less specific and personal version of “heart” (“A Disquisition upon the Soul” in How Things Are plays with that distinction). But if I had to, I’d choose “heart” and “mind,” though I want to blur their distinction and call them “feelings” and “thoughts.” Do we ever have thoughts without feelings? Feelings without thoughts? I’ll have to check! But I wouldn’t be the first poet to say I want a poem to be a confluence of feelings and thoughts, heart and mind, or at least that I want to have feelings and thoughts working together. 

KARAN

In one of these poems, you reflect on the lost art of letter-writing. (I’m hoping it’ll make a comeback. A lot of my time is spent writing letters.) As someone who has worked extensively with aphorisms, how do you see the relationship between brevity and expansiveness in poetry? Does working in these different forms influence your approach toward the other? Or has it ever been a hindrance? I love aphorisms and working with fragments but a kind of fear restrains me from going all the way: what if I cannot return to longform? As someone drowning in the age of social media with our fractured attention spans and hunger for entertainment, that fear is validated every step of the way. Has working across different forms (I know some poems in For Now go on for pages and pages that I dearly love!) challenged your relationship with time and attention?

JAMES

The main thing is just to be able to recognize, when something comes to you, which form or flow or length it wants to be.

My version of your “fear” is much more local or temporary. If I start a morning thinking about poems, I might well go on to thinking about aphorisms. But if I start the day thinking about aphorisms, it’s harder to go on to poems — it’s harder to lose the quickness and go back to the patience. But a good night’s sleep will take care of that. Though, sure, there are months or years when I gravitate more towards longer things or towards shorter things. 

The relationship between cultural impatience and the length of poetry is not clear at all. As an oldtimer I’d say that if anything poetry is getting longer. Possibly that’s because a lot of poets are writing more randomly broken lines. If breaks don’t correspond to something we really hear, we ignore them and start reading the poem like prose, which is (scientific fact!) multiple times faster than poetry or song. The swiftness of prose can easily carry a lot more detail than poetry. Maybe that’s why to a person who still reads the old way, a lot of contemporary poetry seems seriously overwritten. 

Aaron Haspel says “It takes half a lifetime to learn to read slowly.” More than half! I don’t feel that today’s readers necessarily know what to do with very short poems (they seem fine with aphorisms, btw). For example, it takes a bit of self-training to read haiku, and maybe even more self-training than I’ve managed in 10 years of thinking about them to be a really good reader of them. They need to be gazed into. But a lot of readers just fly over them at prose speed, and they’re gone.

KARAN

Your poems often begin with careful observation before moving into deeper philosophical territory. In “Trash Picker,” you write about how “We're all still hunter-gatherers, at heart.” How do you balance the concrete and the abstract in your work? I’m again thinking of your work also as an aphorist — are you ever afraid they’ll be considered as someone trying to be smart? Has there ever been any criticism of your work that you expected or were surprised by? In our 80 or so interviews, I’ve never asked anyone something like this, so forgive me.

JAMES

The general vs. the particular: it’s an eternal problem I despair of summarizing. I certainly don’t think you want to be all air and soul and vagueness. Contemporary poetry has swung the other way, possibly too far. In terms of the personal and the particular, a lot of poems are More is More, and some are…well, just like the guy who talks over everyone else. A poem has to know how to listen, and to listen first to itself.

As for the review part of the question. My first book, Reservations, was absolutely roasted in The New York Times Book Review. I was living near Boston then, and didn’t subscribe, so my father read the review to me over the phone in a tone implying that it must surely be correct (it was, after all, in the Times!) and that I might have irredeemably shamed myself. Well, that’s how it seemed, anyway.

That’s the only time I was ever really stunned by a review. Incidentally, I don’t remember a word of it now. And I find I don’t remember very much of the mostly kind ones that followed.

Actually almost everything that anyone says about your work is a tiny bit strange, right? Whether it’s in a review or in workshop or in conversation? And this can be helpful, even if you decide some of the criticism (or praise) is wrong. It’s so hard to know what you’ve actually written, what it all looks like from outside you! I think one of the things you learn, from reviews partly, but even more from being in workshops, and from teaching them, is that as resonant and essential as it can be in poems, maybe 70% of ambiguity is completely unintentional and maybe 70% (not necessarily the same 70%) is dysfunctional. 

Actually, to go back to Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays, that was the book of mine that got reviewed the most, because back in 2001 it was something of a novelty. What I remember being interested in was that people would disagree on a given aphorism: some would praise it, some would call it a fortune cookie. I could see that: I myself had different opinions on different days, and it helped me figure out that I had a few invalid assumptions about where readers were. On Amazon a couple of people were clearly offended by the whole thing — “sophistry,” one called it. Someone who should have known better said I was “telling people how to live their lives,” which hurt. I imagine that some of the 500 Vectors that really do that. I haven’t gone back to count!

In those latter cases, maybe people were reading too heavily, too literally. As if every book were a recommendation to be like it. It was useful to be reminded that there’s that kind of reader. Me, I thought of Vectors as doing little experiments with thoughts and feelings, and of course words. I hoped that a few, or a lot, would seem fresh and/or funny, if anything. Not advice but observation, not the eternal truths of religion or physics, but literary truths, things that could be true if looked at from a certain angle. Here’s one I don’t think I’ve ever published (there are a 1000+ by now, spread over a half-dozen books, so I can’t entirely trust my bookkeeping):

“Some things to avoid in aphorisms: talking about writing, praising (what you suppose to be) your own virtues, apology, parentheses, qualifications of almost any kind, lists, advice.”

This is actually pretty good advice for an aphorist, I think, but of course the point is that the sentence commits every sin it recommends against.

KARAN

As a longtime poet and a professor at Princeton since 1980, what advice would you give to emerging writers about developing their craft and finding their voice? Any caveats?

JAMES

Just the usual stuff. Pay attention to life, which is advice for anyone, not just poets. And read read read, which is what any older poet at all would tell any young poet. It’s the way to learn the music and the possibilities and to figure out what you need to do, either because you see it in other poets, or because you don’t. And I’d repeat what I just said: you have to listen to what people say about your poems — but not too much! What you can find out mainly is what’s not in the poem that would enable them to see it as you want it to be seen. But don’t listen too much. They might have something to say, but they can’t have read you as carefully as you have, and almost everyone is unknowingly recommending that you write more like they do!

KARAN

Recently, we decided to ask our poets for a poetry prompt at the end. Would you provide a prompt for our readers, to help kickstart a poem?

JAMES

I taught workshops for decades, almost exclusively beginners because that was the most fun. Some prompts were of course necessary, but I wasn’t prioritizing originality in mine so I have nothing clever to pass on. As you might be able to tell from my speech on process, I don’t actually believe in the kind of “production” of poems that prompts end up prompting. With older students, say in my Shortness workshop, I’d just pass out a bunch of one-line poems (or aphorisms, or greguerias, or haiku or quatrains or whatever) and say, “Hey, see if you can write a page of your own.” 

KARAN

We’d also love for you to recommend a piece of art (anything other than a poem) — perhaps a song, a film, or a visual artwork — that you find particularly inspiring or that you think everyone should experience.

JAMES

Connie and I go to live music, mostly jazz and classical, maybe 40 times a year (we’re retired — we can do that stuff) and that accounts for a disproportionate number of the best nights of our life. I’d emphasize the “live” over the specific works: if, say, Helene Grimaux or Vikingur Olafsson, Leslie Pintchik or Robert Glasper — or any of 100 other people, there’s a lot of genius out there — happen to be playing anything at all within 100 miles of you, go. It’s way easier to be blown away at a great concert than a poetry reading, and you need that

KARAN

Finally, because we believe in studying the master’s masters, we would love to know which poets have influenced you most throughout your career.

JAMES

Lord, hundreds. Even before I was a poet, Frost made me want to be one. When I really started writing, I wanted to be W. S. Merwin. Then Hardy and the Renaissance, Romantic and Victorian poets I was teaching and studying became more and more important. I suppose my favorite living American poet would be Kay Ryan (it’s her perfect ear), though that’s a different thing from being able to call her an influence (I wish!) As an aphorist, definitely the Argentinian Antonio Porchia, who I first got to know in Merwin’s translation, Voices.