Sydney Lea
Sydney Lea is the Poet Laureate of Vermont as well as a Pulitzer Prize nominee. He has taught at Dartmouth College, Yale University, and Wesleyan University to name a few. He founded the New England Review in 1977 and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, and Sports Illustrated.
Published 1/8/16
Published 1/8/16
Howl: What is your writing process like?
Lea: I tend to start a poem (or anything non-scholarly, really) on the basis of ome little something –more often than not a snatch of conversation (though it can be something like a smell or a sound or a view—whatever), something I have experienced recently or all the way back to my childhood... It begins with something that occurs to me, apparently quite at random. I never know where I am going from there until very late. Indeed, if I do know too clearly where I am going, I can expect bad results, because nothing will surprise me. As Frost said, “No surprise in the writer, none in the reader.” I write to find out what I didn’t know I knew, or didn’t know I was thinking about. I never sit down with a “subject” in mind per se.
Howl: How do you edit your work?
Lea: I usually write in meter (though that’s rarely glaringly obvious), and in stanzaic form. So I do weird play-time things. I will try and figure out what the dominant meter is in the free-run draft I have put together, and see if I can make that consistent throughout. I count up the number of lines I have in the first draft too. Say it’s 36. I’ll see what the poem looks like in nine stanzas of four lines each. Don’t like it? What about four stanzas of nine lines each? Maybe I don’t like that either, so I’ll see if I can pare away three lines and get to 33, maybe– three eleven-line stanzas? eleven three-line stanzas? Etc. That all sounds very mechanical, of course, and in a way it is; but what it does is to liberate me from the need to mean something too strenuously. It allows me to play with language, in the vague faith that the language will lead me to “meaning,” rather than the other way around.
Maybe also I’ll have a nine-line stanza and discover that lines three and nine rhyme or half-rhyme. What happens if I try and make that the case in every stanza? After enough play, the poem will reveal to me what it wants to be. Sometimes this means two drafts, sometimes fifty, and everything in between.
We need to remember that language is as surely our prime material as paint is a painter’s. Poetry is not first and foremost a vehicle for “ideas.” As my late friend Bill Matthews said, it is not criticism in reverse. The poet doesn’t fret about form, image, metaphor –what have you?—so that the reader can sweep all that away and write his or her essay on the poem’s “meaning.” A good poem never has just one meaning anyhow. No, I abandon myself to my materials– which happen to consist of words.
Howl: What advice do you have for budding writers?
Lea: Write– a lot. Seek counsel from people who know something about the art, of course. But mostly write a lot, regularly, and for a long time. Poetry, after all, is not so much different from basketball or carpentry. You want to get better at something? Well, no matter what it is, you’ll get better by doing a whole bunch of it.
Howl: What inspires you to express yourself through writing as opposed to other creative mediums?
Lea: I wanted to be a jazz musician, and I got pretty good. But I realized one day that that was as good as I was going to get, that I had more capacity for language than for musical performance. I can draw, too, but I have severe limitations as a visual artist beyond that; I can sing pretty well (and did as a younger man for various white-boy blues bands), but I ain’t no Otis Redding. I have a compulsion to the verbal anyhow, an ear for words (I learn foreign languages easily, e.g.); why not take advantage of that?
Howl: What are the most common challenges you face as a writer and how do you overcome them?
Lea: Well, finding time was once a big deal: I was the sole editor of a national literary quarterly, I was teaching full time, and, depending on when you caught me in my earlier career, I had from one to the ultimate five children at home, and I took parenthood very seriously. Most of the time, I had to get up really early in the morning to write. That felt like work, sure; but it never felt like labor. I like to write, and so even at my busiest it’s what I did.
Now I am 73, retired, and all my kids are long out of the house. I have six grand kids, all nearby, and I love spending time with them. But that’s my choice. Otherwise, I am pretty much free as a bird. Oddly, though I have a twelfth book of poems forthcoming and have just published a fourth collection of personal essays, I think I write somewhat less as a free bird than I did as a workaholic. Go figure. If you want to do it, you’ll do it. No one, not even you, can talk yourself into being a writer. Persistence is as important as talent, and you will persist without agony if it’s meant to be.
Lea: I tend to start a poem (or anything non-scholarly, really) on the basis of ome little something –more often than not a snatch of conversation (though it can be something like a smell or a sound or a view—whatever), something I have experienced recently or all the way back to my childhood... It begins with something that occurs to me, apparently quite at random. I never know where I am going from there until very late. Indeed, if I do know too clearly where I am going, I can expect bad results, because nothing will surprise me. As Frost said, “No surprise in the writer, none in the reader.” I write to find out what I didn’t know I knew, or didn’t know I was thinking about. I never sit down with a “subject” in mind per se.
Howl: How do you edit your work?
Lea: I usually write in meter (though that’s rarely glaringly obvious), and in stanzaic form. So I do weird play-time things. I will try and figure out what the dominant meter is in the free-run draft I have put together, and see if I can make that consistent throughout. I count up the number of lines I have in the first draft too. Say it’s 36. I’ll see what the poem looks like in nine stanzas of four lines each. Don’t like it? What about four stanzas of nine lines each? Maybe I don’t like that either, so I’ll see if I can pare away three lines and get to 33, maybe– three eleven-line stanzas? eleven three-line stanzas? Etc. That all sounds very mechanical, of course, and in a way it is; but what it does is to liberate me from the need to mean something too strenuously. It allows me to play with language, in the vague faith that the language will lead me to “meaning,” rather than the other way around.
Maybe also I’ll have a nine-line stanza and discover that lines three and nine rhyme or half-rhyme. What happens if I try and make that the case in every stanza? After enough play, the poem will reveal to me what it wants to be. Sometimes this means two drafts, sometimes fifty, and everything in between.
We need to remember that language is as surely our prime material as paint is a painter’s. Poetry is not first and foremost a vehicle for “ideas.” As my late friend Bill Matthews said, it is not criticism in reverse. The poet doesn’t fret about form, image, metaphor –what have you?—so that the reader can sweep all that away and write his or her essay on the poem’s “meaning.” A good poem never has just one meaning anyhow. No, I abandon myself to my materials– which happen to consist of words.
Howl: What advice do you have for budding writers?
Lea: Write– a lot. Seek counsel from people who know something about the art, of course. But mostly write a lot, regularly, and for a long time. Poetry, after all, is not so much different from basketball or carpentry. You want to get better at something? Well, no matter what it is, you’ll get better by doing a whole bunch of it.
Howl: What inspires you to express yourself through writing as opposed to other creative mediums?
Lea: I wanted to be a jazz musician, and I got pretty good. But I realized one day that that was as good as I was going to get, that I had more capacity for language than for musical performance. I can draw, too, but I have severe limitations as a visual artist beyond that; I can sing pretty well (and did as a younger man for various white-boy blues bands), but I ain’t no Otis Redding. I have a compulsion to the verbal anyhow, an ear for words (I learn foreign languages easily, e.g.); why not take advantage of that?
Howl: What are the most common challenges you face as a writer and how do you overcome them?
Lea: Well, finding time was once a big deal: I was the sole editor of a national literary quarterly, I was teaching full time, and, depending on when you caught me in my earlier career, I had from one to the ultimate five children at home, and I took parenthood very seriously. Most of the time, I had to get up really early in the morning to write. That felt like work, sure; but it never felt like labor. I like to write, and so even at my busiest it’s what I did.
Now I am 73, retired, and all my kids are long out of the house. I have six grand kids, all nearby, and I love spending time with them. But that’s my choice. Otherwise, I am pretty much free as a bird. Oddly, though I have a twelfth book of poems forthcoming and have just published a fourth collection of personal essays, I think I write somewhat less as a free bird than I did as a workaholic. Go figure. If you want to do it, you’ll do it. No one, not even you, can talk yourself into being a writer. Persistence is as important as talent, and you will persist without agony if it’s meant to be.