David Lehman |
Published: June 1st, 2015
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David Lehman is an acclaimed American poet and series editor of The Best American Poetry series. Lehman also teaches at The New School.
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Howl: As a poet, what is your writing process?
Lehman: I love to write — whether with pen or pencil in the pocket notebook I carry around with me wherever I go or at my desk facing a computer screen. Any time of day suits me. But I seem to have a special affinity for the late afternoon and for the midnight hour. If I am stuck I like to give myself a challenge: for example, writing a sestina, or a tight rhyming poem, or a poem in an ad hoc form in which, say, every line contains an anagram of a word in the previous line. To write a sequence or series of poems attracts me, because each poem stands on its own and must function within a larger structure. Having that larger structure in place makes things easier: I am completing a manuscript entitled "Poems in the Manner Of." Each poem in the book is an imitation, a parody, an homage, or an appropriation of a great deceased poet, from Catullus through Charles Bukowski and Frank O'Hara. Howl: How do you edit your work? Lehman: Revising is a very creative part of composition. Sometimes an abandoned draft from five years ago can supply the perfect pretext for a new poem — it turns out you needed the extra years in order to write an apt conclusion or to rewrite a weak opening. Like other poets, I sometimes rely on editors — poetry editors at various magazines — to help me determine whether I have succeeded or not with a given effort. Howl: When you read poetry for enjoyment or perhaps as an editor, what do you look for? Lehman: Freshness, candor, a feel for the language, a feel for form and possibility. Also, I like reading poems that stray from the conventions of the day. One irony is that a poem that may have been rebellious forty years ago is tame and conformist today. All other things being equal, I'd rather read a poem about something — something other than the poet's love life or difficult relations with his or her parents. Howl: In The Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition, you mention in the forward, “Anxiety can certainly prove a source for poetry.” There is certainly plenty of anxiety experienced by youth from high school to college, so what advice would you have for young budding writers? Lehman: Writing poetry is or can be an escape from self-consciousness, anxiety, and negative emotions. When you write a poem you are completely in control. (Poets are notorious control freaks.) When you write for a newspaper or for a TV show, you may expect changes dictated or suggested by editors. But when you write a poem, the only person you really have to please is yourself. That is incredibly liberating. Howl: Why do you believe poetry is your creative medium of choice…if “choice” is even the right word? Lehman: I fell in love with poetry — specific poems, yes, but also the very idea of verse — when I was in high school. In my very first month at Columbia, where I was an undergraduate, I joined the "Columbia Review" literary magazine, wrote a poem every day, and was on my way. You can't control these things — they just happen. |