» Katmai . 4%.?“ «m. A? 5— SILNM" 1.5:. .3331... 57 .? VI.) tqziflh-XSi fin. . mfifim u.» an an, .. Lil. i: 2......5 .533... .51.... . 23:6... 19‘.“ 0”; t; I i :{x‘ 93% .311... 9 {2.5.3},{ :3... \ L...x:..« (5.342.? A ‘bfl. hintiik. sh Jitt’l. S. v.12] t1 , .1. .22!!! ‘ 212...! 2. ...i.§...l£usa...u.u..h .3. 9!. lo\.“&i..1£ .1}! .v 1 .55.! 1:.“ : Trams; ' ft .5 LIBRARY ‘0” Michigan State University This is to certify that the dissertation entitled POETS ON INVENTING: REVISIONING INVENTION THEORY, PRACTICE AND PEDAGOGY WITHIN RHETORIC, COMPOSITION, ENGLISH EDUCATION AND CREATIVE WRITING presented by JASON WIRTZ has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctoral degree in Rhetoric and Writing avg/4W Manessor’s Signature September 22, 2008 Date MS U is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer .u-I-l-'-l-0-l-l—'-U-l-'-'-'-I-l-'-n-l-C-‘-0-.-‘-l--I-l-l-i- PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record. TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due. MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested. DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE 5/08 K1/Prolecc&PresICIRCIDateDue indd POETS ON INV ENTIN G: REVISIONING INVENTION THEORY, PRACTICE AND PEDAGOGY WITHIN RHETORIC, COMPOSITION, ENGLISH EDUCATION AND CREATIVE WRITING By Jason Wirtz A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Rhetoric and Writing 2008 ABSTRACT POETS ON INVENTING: REVISIONING INVENTION THEORY, PRACTICE AND PEDAGOGY WITHIN RHETORIC, COMPOSITION, ENGLISH EDUCATION AND CREATIVE WRITING By Jason Wirtz This dissertation examines the rhetorical cannon of invention across the disciplinary fields of rhetoric, composition, English education, and creative writing. An analysis of the history of invention—theories, practitioner accounts, and pedagogi es—in these three fields suggests that there has been an absence of conversation among them, especially as creative writing has grown as an academic field of study. Traditional Western rhetoric takes its understanding of invention from the Aristotelian rhetorical canon. In composition pedagogy and English education, invention is most directly tied to expressivist views and process pedagogy. The Operational question guiding this dissertation is "How can the ways in which poets speaking to invention practices and approaches add to the understanding of invention in the fields of rhetoric and composition and English education?" In order tO answer this question, the author interviewed five practicing and professional poets: Diane Wakoski, Bill Olsen, Elizabeth Kerlikowske, Stuart Dybek, and Diane Seuss. 1n the interview methodology employed, interview was designed as a conversation about invention practices and approaches. The interview data was analyzed to identify invention strategies employed by these poets, theoretical approaches, and attitudes towards the teaching of writing and the development of writers. Implications drawn from the analysis Of the interview data are developed and discussed. It is clear that creative writing would benefit fi'om engaging (and valuing) explicit discussions of invention practices and approaches, and that composition studies and English education could benefit from complicating and extending its theory and pedagogy of invention by listening to creative writers. DEDICATION I dedicate this to Laura Julier for being my number one invention strategy as a trusted reader who would allow me to barge into her office unannounced, provide quick responses, and laugh generously at my missteps. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 What We Talk About When We Talk About Invention: Tracing My Way Into Invention Theory, Practice and Pedagogy ........................... 1 Chapter 2 Ubiquitous and Fleeting: Tracing Invention Historically ..................................... 17 From the rise to the fall: Invention in classical rhetoric to the eighteenth century ....................................................... 18 Out of the product came the process: Invention in composition studies ........................................................ 20 Yes, getting students to write is invention: Invention in English education ........................................................... 32 Discipline is a four—letter word: Invention in creative writing .............................................................. 48 Chapter 3 Connecting Personal Experience and Research: A Qualitative Interview Methodology ............................................................ 69 Tensions across three fields ............................................................... 69 Where I enter this conversation on invention ........................................... 74 Qualitative methodology in writing studies: Overview and complications .............................................................. 76 Research design ............................................................................ 94 Chapter 4 Speaking With Poets: Invention Strategies and Practices .................................... 112 Getting started ............................................................................. 116 Visual images as props ........................................................... 117 Play with form ..................................................................... 122 Entering the linguistic realm .................................................... 127 Preparing for accidents: Developing an attitude of receptivity ............ 129 “It’s that vision that takes you”: A writer’s slant ............................. 132 The use of models / ideal examples ........................................... 136 Giving oneself overt assignments ............................................. 140 Reasons for Writing: “It’s an endlessly fascinating, happy struggle” ..... 141 There’s no arrival: Breaking habit as a source Of continual invention... 147 Channeling ........................................................................ 149 Re-entering the text, or, Revision as invention ....................................... 151 Places for invention within the text ............................................ 151 The text informs itself ........................................................... 154 Using trusted readers and writing groups ..................................... 160 v Discerning when it’s a (real) poem ............................................ 163 The text as other and the writer’s relationship to it .......................... 165 From a consciously developed craft to instinct and intuition. . . . . . . . 1 67 Chapter 5 Revisiting the Disciplines: Poets Inform Invention Theory and Practice ................................................... 172 Encouraging conversations across invention and revision .......................... 172 The situation of the author: Revisiting traditional notions of kairos ................................................. 180 Imitatio: Hermeneutic invention ........................................................ 190 From craft to instinct: Rethinking spontaneity and James Britton’s “Shaping at the point of utterance” ................................. 196 Chapter 6 Poets Speak to Invention Pedagogy: Implications ............................................. 201 You can teach technique but can only encouraging the rest ........................ 202 Accelerants as effective teaching ...................................................... 213 Teaching writers to use "inventiveness" ............................................... 217 Talk about poetry: Metacognition ...................................................... 224 Teaching affects one’s writing .......................................................... 226 Pedagogical implications ................................................................ 231 Appendix A: Diane Wakoski interview transcription ......................................... 240 Appendix B: Bill Olsen interview transcription ............................................... 286 Appendix C: Elizabeth Kerlikowske interview transcription ................................ 303 Appendix D: Stuart Dybek interview transcription ........................................... 329 Appendix E: Diane Seuss interview transcription ............................................. 341 Works Cited ........................................................................................ 373 vi Chapter 1 What We Talk About When We Talk About Invention: Tracing My Way Into Invention Theory, Practice and Pedagogy I would like to open this dissertation by admitting to a cliche: Hemingway was the author that made me want to be a writer. I know this is a cliché because the first writing teacher I encountered in my MFA program, Jaime Gordon, wrinkled her nose when I told her this and responded, “After all these years he’s still sending people my way.” Of course at the time I had no idea that this was a tired, well-worn path into writing; it took J aime’s response for me to understand that I was a cliche' to her just as much as I viewed my students’ use of “In today’s society” to open a paper or descriptions relying on several iterations Of the word “amazing.” Although I did pore over “Hills Like White Elephants” hoping to pick up on the magic I felt was there and I did teach A Farewell To A_rln_s to a group Of sophomore students in high school even though the seasoned teachers in my department informed me that it would be nothing less than “brutal,” it was a book called Conversations with Ernest Hemingway that really piqued my curiosity and fueled my desire to be a writer. Conversations with Ernest Hemingway was just that—conversations with Hemingway in the form of interviews with such newspapers, magazines, and journals as the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. If I had to narrow down my attraction to this collection I would have to say that this was my first glimpse behind the scenes into a writer’s life. And not only that, it was a glimpse into the life Of an author that I already felt an affinity with as a result of reading everything I could get my hands on that he had written. Although I would go on to move in a carnivorous manner through subsequent authors, Hemingway was the first that I felt wholly subsumed by and this collection of interviews offered me insights that I had not before considered available. What were these insights that grabbed me so? I can take this book from my shelf and find the check marks, asterisks, underlining, arrows and circles still there—remnants fi'om my first reading of this book almost exactly ten years ago, except for the marks of a different color and density which speak to second, third, and fifteenth reads. In an interview with George Plimpton I note that he stands when he writes. He stands when he writes! Something like this had never occurred to me, it would be like belting out a song while sitting. What if I were to try standing up and compose on a reading board and typewriter chest-high? What would that do to my own writing? My next check mark is beside a few sentences that talk about Hemingway keeping track of his daily practice “so as not to kid myself.” Plimpton describes a large chart “made out of the side of a cardboard packing case” on which numbers are written showing the daily output of words from “450, 575, 462, 1250, to 512.” He charts his progress by counting the number of words he has written each day! This scared me more than anything else—and still does— because of its calculated ability to disapprove. Could this strategy directly contribute to the fact that his prose is so accurate and deliberate? Is there a connection between this practice Of counting words and the fact that every word in a Hemingway story is so consciously plotted? These bits of recounted observations and insights into Hemingway’s positioning toward his own writing—what I refer to as his metacognitive process—expanded and opened doors fer me. As a result, my thinking (aka theory) and the way I wrote (aka practice) began to change and this, in turn, affected my thinking about the teaching of writing and the ways in which I taught writing. From this point I was hooked on this type of discourse in which authors spoke to their metacognitive approaches and practices—never calling it such of course. I was able to put a name to what I was reading because of my work in composition and rhetoric and English education, which placed a premium value on knowledge about the making of knowledge and on the disciplinary practice of assigning words to thoughts as a means to codify our understanding of the writing process. So here I was looking across my high school teaching experience, my MFA experience, and my experience studying both rhetoric and composition and English education and it felt as though these fields were not talking to one another. Wendy Bishop, a key figure for me in this cross-disciplinary orientation and resulting discussion, writes about the lack of communication across these fields this way: It is important to emphasize that teachers participate in a complicated acculturation process within departments of English. As graduate students, many progress through the various strands of English studies looking for a home. For instance, I started in creative writing, quickly added literature, discovered and moved into rhetoric and, all the while, kept up my interests in all my earlier types Of writing and reading. I wanted to connect my knowledge of writing and reading, discovered in the separate “strands,” but was not encouraged to do so. I don’t think, from conversations with colleagues, that mine is simply a naive academic Bildungsroman—there is rarely an easy initiation into English studies. But I have been able to begin sorting my confusions with the help of the institutional histories and professional critiques that are becoming more available (185). One of the teachers in my MFA program was Stuart Dybek. He was an accomplished oral storyteller in the classroom and would recount tales of his early writing career and life growing up in Chicago. He confided to our class one evening that he could never write down a story that he had already told out loud “because the story was already out there.” When he wrote stories he needed to not know what was going to happen next, and he never planned a story or thought about a story outside of his writing studio. For Dybek, this invention strategy helped to make his prose spontaneous and surprising. This was revelatory for me since I was constantly plotting, outlining, and graphing my stories. It struck me then that this was a fruitful place to begin looking across these fields of study which were of so much interest to me. This generative, fruitful place was named invention by the fields of composition and English education. Invention was the name for the type of discourse I was so enthralled with in collections featuring writers talking to their writing processes. The shape of this dissertation takes its cue fiom this initial impulse (developed so many years ago) to read what writers had to say about how they came up with their ideas and how they shaped their writing on the page. While never straying from this attraction to writers on writing, I have in the years since looked to other locations of invention. Scenario Number One: She walks slowly and quietly around the room, not wanting to disturb any one of the 35 high school students slouched in desks which push the classroom walls to capacity. She knows that if one student so much as coughs, or asks a fliend for a pen across the aisle, the fragile state that is silence will give way to what she calls the “popcorn eflect ”—one kernel pops with the rest quick to follow. As a way to savor this fleeting moment she takes inventory: Jake, by the door, is busy crossing out whole lines and paragraphs as quickly as he can write them down. Cassandra’s paper has words written out very deliberately, somewhat delicately, and she pauses before each word, measuring twice and cutting once. Sean, who sits in the back of the room, has his head leaning against the wall. She has learned to recognize the diflerence between his stares— one that is bored and the precursor to acting out and the one she sees now, a productive internal contemplation while his eyes fixate on a single ceiling tile. And Tasha by the window who moves her lips while composing an inaudible monologue. Scenario Number Two: It’s Friday night and all of her fi'iends are at the bar. Her silenced cell phone blinks on and of on the bed, letting her know they want her to meet them out somewhere. She places a pillow over the phone and sits at her desk with her computer screen in front of her. "l.- ’ She gets the sudden urge to empty the dishwasher, pay the electric bill, call her mother. Did she leave the front door unlocked? No. I’ve got to sit here, she tells herself remembering that the hardest part is always the beginning. Scenario Number Three: Knowing that he ’s put it off for too long already, Professor Amir locates the folder in his computer labeled “Letters of Rec ” and opens it. Cascading downward are all the letters of recommendation he’s written over the years. He scans the list and opens three diferent names that he recognizes as being on par with his current student. He reads them over and closes the two that are, in his quick estimation, the least useful. He then changes the name at the top of the open letter to the name of his current student and pauses, realizing that he will eventually rewrite the entire letter just as he always has. These vignettes present writers in the act of inventing. We see student writers responding to a writing prompt in various ways, the lone writer in her room fighting Off distractions, and the seasoned professor charged with the task of writing yet another letter of recommendation. These moments of invention elicit a rapid succession Of questions. For example, in the first scene of students composing: How can we best understand student invention practices? Is it better that each student have his/her own invention strategy or should teachers try to universalize invention strategies among their students? How does one best go about teaching invention? \' Consider the second scene of the lone writer at work: How best can we help this particular writer invent? Why is invention such a laborious act at times? What thought patterns aid invention? What thoughts really hinder invention and how do we know the difference? What heuristics are available to aid invention and how do they work? Why are heuristics so difficult to transport from one context to another? What unique invention strategies does this writer employ? From the third scenario: How do different genres of writing call for different invention strategies? How does one’s writerly identity—in this case, with the authority of a professor—act upon invention? How does this writerly identity shift and change as writing events shift and change? How does experience within a given mode Of writing affect one’s invention strategies? And there are also scenarios number four, and five, six, and so on, all the way up to umpteenth scenario. For example, during a Q&A a popular author talked about stopping on the side of the highway to write down what his characters were telling him in his head. Joyce Carol Oates writes about how she had to write an entire novel because the narrator just wouldn’t shut up and it was distracting her from the novel she was intending to write. Stephen King references his muse as a little guy with wings and a cigar who admires his bowling trophies. I just finished reading a writer who had a novel rejected 36 times because he tried to write a novel, but it wasn't until he stopped trying to write a novel that he wrote a very successful one. What the does all this mean? If all writing is problem-solving than this question—what does all this mean?-—is the drive behind this dissertation. Rather than leaving the scope of the dissertation as Open-ended and ultimately futile as “What does all this mean?” I’ve winnowed a! o- 5,. xi. IO. ‘l considerably to provide some workable boundaries, incanting a mantra from one of the poets I interviewed, Diane Seuss, who posits: limitation is creative. With limitation as a means off developing focus, this dissertation approaches questions regarding invention fi'om three general angles: (1) through a View of the history of invention within the fields Of classical rhetoric, composition studies, English education, and creative writing; (2) through the view of interviewed, practicing/published poets; and (3) through revisiting these fields of study in light of what these poets have to say on invention. As another constructive limitation, I’ve focused on what these interviewed poets have to say about invention rather than combing the hundreds of books and articles in which writers are interviewed and say something about the process of invention. Although I do reference such readings in the history Of invention within the field Of creative writing (chapter 2), I do not attempt a deep analysis in the way that I do with these interviews. My reasoning is twofold: first, this would place my study out of considerable reach and, second, I don’t have control over the questions asked in previously published interview collections or the situations in which the questions were asked. Fields or disciplines are amporphous and shifting categories, subject as much to institutional politics as to bodies Of scholarship. They are names and labels by which we group ourselves and understand the boundaries Of the enterprise with which we concern ourselves. English education was the first field that I entered as a student and then professional. I never wanted to be a high school teacher growing up because my parents were both teachers—my mother, for example, taught Latin at the high school level for 40 years. It took Mr. Hughs’ 11‘h grade English class, and the introduction tO transcendentalism that he provided, to make me realize that I wanted to become a high school teacher. I was drawn to the autonomy that high school teaching Offered; as a teacher, I would be able to write my own day into existence by choosing the materials to cover in my class and structuring activities the way that I felt best met student needs. My undergraduate training in English education was intensive and culminated in a year—long student teaching experience. Looking back, however, I have to say that this training did not prepare me well for the teaching of writing and, as a result, the concept and practice of invention was almost entirely absent from my coursework. I was taught how to teach the critical reading of literature and student writing assignments were designed to demonstrate this critical reading. Throughout my undergraduate career I was writing short stories, which I would share with my roommates, fiiends, and family members. It never occurred to me to make a connection between these two activities—I Operated under the unquestioned assumption that the teaching of English and my own creative writing were necessarily separate endeavors. It is no surprise that when I began teaching high school English at a large school in California, I reverted back to a very traditional View of teaching secondary writing— my students wrote variations of the five-paragraph theme that were meant to demonstrate their abilities to critically read and interpret a text. The fact that I was teaching over 170 students per day reinforced the appropriateness of this type of writing assignment which could be easily graded (and that grade easily justified). All the while I was still plodding away at my own writing at night in a coffee shop that sold cheap but terribly bitter coffee. I began dreaming of having more time to pursue my own writing. The constant pressure of so many students left me with little time to think my own thoughts, let alone write them down, and so I began thinking Of ways to free my time for my own writing pursuits. An MFA program was my answer. I pored over the writing I had done within the past few years—short stories and the beginnings of a novel—searching for a piece to revise and submit with my application. Remarkably, I was still not making connections between my own writing and the way that I taught writing. Looking back, I believe that this must have been deliberate—— my writing time was my writing time and I didn’t want to have professional work impede that. I found, for example, that after teaching for a few years it was very difficult for me to read something without my teaching filter, without drinking Of how this text would be read and understood by my students (and it was not even “students” as a general term but specific students and how I had come to understand and postulate their particular world- views). I feared this could happen with my writing. When the acceptance letter from Western Michigan came, I accepted. A few days before classes began, I went for a morning run. The day was warm and the grass was a healthy summer-green and when I closed my eyes I could have been back in California. I was musing on how maybe the Michigan weather won't be really that bad, maybe the winter won’t really be that oppressively gray, when my mother practically ran me over with her mini-van. She was more out Of breath than I was when she rolled down the window to tell me the department chair had been trying to contact me all morning. He wanted to Offer me a graduate assistantship teaching first-year writing. I was in an Office later that afternoon with the department chair and the professor who oversaw the freshman composition program. The chair was a playwright and the professor running the program had a PhD in rhetoric and composition from Purdue. The department chair was animated, excited to Offer me the position, but the program director 10 was visibly frustrated—she looked at me and then looked down to the floor, closing her eyes and shaking her head. When he left the room I found out why. “We have been training the new MFA folk for the past two weeks on how to teach this course,” she told me. My course met in the morning, the next day. The tenor of our conversation turned dramatically positive after I shared with her my experiences teaching high school and asked incredulously, just to be sure, “Let me get this straight—you want me to teach only one course of 25 students?” My teaching of writing was overhauled as a result Of this course, which gave me the Opportunity for the first time in my teaching career to actually teach writing. One course of 25 students meant I could actually read five papers over the course of a semester and write out responses. I could spend entire weeks on peer review and, most importantly, capital-L Literature no longer dominated the landscape. These were the teaching conditions I had needed in order to begin making connections between my writing, my teaching, and my scholarship. Although I didn’t know it at the time, invention was the primary place where this connection would happen. I was first introduced to invention in the explicit, academic sense in a composition course I took during this MFA program. Our textbook for the course was Victor Villanueva’s _C_r_c_)s_s-Talk in Comp Theory, which introduced me to an entirely new discourse, an entirely new field of study. Here was a field that was struggling to name and identify the writing process. I can remember my surprise upon reading Flower and Hayes to find that someone had actually attempted to map the writing process! The contrast that this field offered to the way that my creative writing courses approached the writing process could not have been more stark. My creative writing courses were 11 iv“ predicated on the fact that writers already had the writing done and what they most needed at this advanced point was a group of writers to provide feedback. The writing process was completely mystified in these courses and in the few books that I could find in which authors spoke to their own writing practices. The teacher in me that wanted to help unpack the writing process for my students was drawn to the field of composition/rhetoric and the writer in me that wanted to learn as much as I could about this writing process—a process that was more and more cast as a mystery by the field of creative writing—was also drawn to this field. I began focusing a great deal of attention to this field—choosing courses on rhetoric/composition and English education—that worked so hard to consciously understand the writing process. When I was teaching high school English I dreamed of being in an MFA program; when I was in the MFA program I dreamed of focusing my attention on rhetoric and composition and English education. So it came as little surprise that when I entered the PhD program in Rhetoric and Writing, I dreamed of working on my poetry. The source Of my tension within the PhD program was that I felt the fields of rhetoric/composition and English education were completely unaware of the field of creative writing and the ways that this field values knowledge about writing in a completely different manner. I was able to use this tension generatively, giving several talks over the next few years about the crossover that I saw evident which wasn’t being taken advantage of within these fields. At College Composition and Communication conferences 1 presented papers with titles such as "Bridging the Academic-Narrative Divide," "Crossroads in Composition and Creative Writing: What Creative Writing Can Offer the Composition Classroom” and “Imagination: Common Ground for Fiction Writers, Academic Writers, and Freshmen 12 Composition Students." For national conferences of high school teachers of English, I spoke about “Let’s talk about the Whys and Ways We Use Creative Writing in the Classroom” and “Invention Strategies of Fiction Writers.” As an area of scholarship, invention was a way to make connections across my lived experiences within fields of study that seemed to me interrelated bur presented themselves as separate. What gave rise to this study was not only my own difficulty in managing the ways these three fields interacted with my own life history but also, once I began to study their histories and theoretical foundations, the ways they continue not to speak to one another. This dissertation is my current articulation an ongoing effort to view these fields as interrelated in ways that can inform and improve these fields. I begin in Chapter 2 of this study with a historical overview of invention within classical rhetoric, composition studies, English education, and creative writing. This look at invention within and across these fields Of study is intended to (1) provide the history that will act as a sounding board against which novel practices and approaches toward invention on the part of the interviewed authors can be heard; (2) provide a history that helps to discern what’s missing from the story of invention within these fields. Chapter 3, “Connecting Personal Experience and Research: A Qualitative Interview Methodology,” builds on chapter 2 by drawing on the history of invention within these fields in order to discern the inventional tensions across the fields. These noted tensions illustrate a need within the existing scholarship for the type of work in this dissertation. In addition to discerning inventional tensions across fields, chapter 3 notes the epistemological and resulting methodological differences between the field of creative writing and the fields of composition and English education. This is followed by 13 a close analysis of three popular studies, making the case for how this dissertation differs and how such differences serve to illuminate new information on invention. In particular, my study moves away from the experimentalist research paradigm by lengthening and deepening the methodological gaze on the invention practices of practicing/professional writers through the deployment of a qualitative interview methodology which trusts the participants to speak honestly and clearly to their invention practices, positions the interviewee and interviewer as sharing equal footing, and views the resulting data as being co-constructed. Chapter 3 then meticulously explicates the interview method employed by working through the aspects of thematizing, designing, interviewing, transcribing, analyzing, verifying, and reporting. Designing is perhaps the most complex and important, as it argues for the type of questions and stances that need to be adopted in order to elicit information that typically operates on a tacit level. Chapter 4, “Speaking With Poets: Invention Strategies and Practices,” introduces the five poets interviewed for this qualitative study: Diane Wakoski, Elizabeth Kerlikowske, Bill Olsen, Stuart Dybek, and Diane Seuss. This chapter takes as its central aim the explication and categorization of the interview data in a manner that provides a flexible and nuanced frame for the reader. On a global level, the frame is twofold as it first speaks to the invention practices Of these authors in a manner that is most typically associated with invention: getting started. The second global categorization is named “Re-entering the Text, or, Revision as Invention” and makes the argument that invention is an important player within the process of revision. Each of these categories is further developed in a more nuanced, localized fashion. “Getting Started” includes ten invention practices: visual images as prompts, play with form, entering the linguistic realm, 14 preparing for accidents: developing and attitude of receptivity, writerly slant, the use of models/ideal examples, overt assignments, reasons for writing, breaking habits, and channeling. “Re-entering the Text, or, Revision as Invention” includes six revision strategies which rely on invention: places for invention within the text, the text informs itself, using trusted readers and writing groups, discerning when it’s a (real) poem, the text as "other," and from craft to instinct. Chapter 5, “Revisiting the Disciplines: Poets Inform Invention Theory and Practice,” draws heavily from chapter 4 by arguing that the fields of composition and English education can learn from how these poets speak to their invention practices and approaches. In particular, chapter 5 develops four main arguments as a result of the analyzed data from chapter 4: (1) that revision, specifically what is commonly referred to as “deep” revision, necessarily includes invention; (2) that traditional notions of kairos must be expanded in light of what these authors have to say about their invention practices; (3) that imitation is an important type of invention often ignored or improperly adapted within the fields of composition and English education; and (4) that James Britton’s “shaping at the point Of utterance” should be revisited in light of what these poets say about making the transition from a consciously developed craft toward an ethos Of production marked by operating with instinct and intuition. Chapter 6, "Poets Speak to Invention Pedagogy: Implications” analyzes the interview data paying particular attention to what these poets have to say regarding invention pedagogy before returning to the fields of composition and English education once more to view this data in light of how these fields of study have traditionally named and dealt with certain tensions regarding invention pedagogy. A central claim of this 15 _. chapter is that while these interviewed authors do Offer significant gains in terms of both invention theory and practice, they do not offer significantly new insights into invention pedagogy—an area where composition studies and English education have done the most exhaustive work. This chapter takes up three main inventional tensions within the fields of composition and English education and shows how these poets deal with the same tensions. The three tensions include: (1) challenging students to develop and/or encouraging autonomous development, (2) freedom as invention and/or restriction as invention, and (3) interpretation and/or production. Rather than being viewed as binaries, these tensions are best viewed as existing along a spectrum. Furthermore, the argument is developed that these three tensions should be re-viewed as sites of creative tensions, as generative sites existing at the crosshairs of these fields, as sites of invention. 16 Chapter 2 Ubiquitous and Fleeting: Tracing Invention Historically One way Of viewing invention—to orient invention—is to look across its history: where invention has been located and how it has been understood. Already we run into conflict, however, on several different fronts as diverse, and oftentimes competing, histories must be recognized. First of all, invention does not behave like a set of tangible goods that can be manipulated and transported at will. While the canonical Western historical View of rhetoric and subsequently the fields Of composition studies and English education Offer an institutionalized view of invention, there certainly exists a history Of invention which has not been institutionalized or disciplined. The fact that such alternative histories Of invention exist is evidenced by the ways in which people have continuously invented through writing over the same time span that stretches from the Sophists to current day—classical rhetoricians had no more a monopoly on invention during their day than the field Of rhetoric and composition does today. Other than this non-institutionalized history Of rhetoric, there are alternative rhetorics with histories of their own such as Asian rhetorics, feminist rhetorics, cultural rhetorics, visual rhetorics, digital rhetorics, transnational rhetorics, etc. Any and all of these histories intersect and disperse at various points. Tracing a history Of invention has proven a useful heuristic towards framing questions about invention and in leading me to the heart of my investigative project, and 17 so for my purposes here, I will be using the most canonical Of histories—the Western view—as a type of sounding board from which to depart and return. One of the reasons that I want to trace a Western view of inventional history is to point out the gaps and tensions that arise within this history. Non-institutionalized views of invention, creative writing for example, are places to which I wish to return later in an effort to signify how much we can gain by analyzing how invention “happens” across different contexts. Perhaps most important to this View of inventional history is what’s not here as well as what tensions exist between the fields of classical rhetoric, composition, English education, and creative writing. From the Rise to the Fall: Invention in Classical Rhetoric to the Eighteenth Century Beginning with the “Dissoi Logoi” the Sophists present an argument that truth is relative. There is no such thing as absolute good and bad for example, only perspectives in which people make arguments and position themselves as good and others as bad. Thus, the “Dissoi Logoi” takes the position that understanding both sides of an argument is the best means of understanding a given situation. This is the earliest recorded inventional technique, literally translated “opposing arguments.” Plato reacts strongly against this type of Sophistic rhetoric by arguing that there do exist absolute, knowable truths and that to purposefully dissuade an audience through rhetoric is harmful. Plato presents four inventional techniques in his most mature work, “Phaedrus”: ( 1) inspiration of the muses; (2) dissonance between two arguments which 18 prompts a third; (3) adaption to the situation (kairos) through audience awareness; and (4) love. Inspiration and love reflect his idea that there exist knowable truths. Isocrates is best known for his development of kairos which he develops much differently than Plato. Specifically, Isocrates does not believe in truth as external, rather, he argues that truth is arrived at conditionally based upon the situation at hand. Through this reasoning, Isocrates places invention within rhetoric and thus claims rhetoric to be more art than technique. Isocractes is also credited with naming writing as more inventional than merely presentational. Thus, for Isocrates words are the site Of invention and for Plato words merely get in the way. Aristotle, in both his On Rhetoric and Poetics, introduces a systematic, logical reasoning which elevates rhetoric beyond mere emotional appeal to one’s audience (although this is still an important part of persuasion). Rhetoric becomes scientific, it becomes mathematical and systematic. His inventional strategies take the form of topics and special topics which serve as heuristic aids in invention. It is worth noting that Aristotle separates rhetoric and poetics by the affordances and limitations assigned to each mode of discourse which necessitate different inventional approaches. By the 16th century, Peter Ramus wrestles invention from rhetoric, which has the effect of leaving rhetoric bankrupt of any sort of recognizable content. Rhetoric is afforded mere presentation while invention is placed within particular fields of study such as math and science. In the 18th and 19th centuries, George Campbell and Hugh Blair reify this stance with their long-standing influential textbooks that place invention outside Of rhetoric. As a result, rhetoric becomes a mere service to disciplines with more visibly present content. 19 The revival of rhetoric in the early 20tln century takes place with such thinkers as Kenneth Burke and LA. Richards who successfully blur the boundaries between Literature and rhetoric by placing invention back into every day discourse (i.e., rhetoric). Burke’s pentad and Richard’s explication of symbolic action are the heuristics which serve to reinvest invention within rhetoric. In scholarship of the 19703 and 1980s that can be referred to as a direct linking back to classical rhetoric, James Kinneavey argues for a revival of the neglected sophistic concept of kairos, James Raymond recasts enthymeme and example as assumptions and paradigms and John Gage argues that dialectic, enthymeme, and stasis are rhetorical acts of discovery and validation of knowledge (Lauer 88). Such large strokes may give the impression that this historical view of classical invention is somehow a single, unified narrative. This isn’t the case as scholars continue to debate and reshape our understanding of how ancient rhetoricians positioned invention. This type of scholarship—which revisits classical rhetoric in an effort to recast and renew ancient concept—is a familiar and can be seen in more recent appearances of invention. Out of the Product Came the Process: Invention in Composition Studies A descendent Of eighteenth century rhetoric and writing instruction, current- traditional rhetoric is characterized by formalism, a focus on grammatical correctness, and an emphasis on the traditional four modes—exposition, description, narration, and argument. In its preoccupation with the final product, current traditional rhetoric ignores invention by forwarding the belief that invention can not be taught. The reaction to this 20 product-driven, current traditional rhetoric was the banner coined by Don Murray and held aloft by a new generation of compositionists: “Teach the process not the product.” The following historical account will chronicle the steps from current-traditionalist rhetoric to today within the field of composition and rhetoric. This history is guided by a concern for the treatment Of invention during this time period. In order to revive invention, compositionists looked to the work of LA. Richards and Kenneth Burke in ways that Richards and Burke did not foresee. Richards and Burke were both interested in the study of interpretation, or hermeneutics. In The Philosophy of W, Richards argues for ambiguity as the highest thought-process and for the importance of contextual understanding for interpretation and meaning construction. Kenneth Burke’s “The Five Master Terms” introduced the dramatistic pentad—act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose—as an aid to textual interpretation. Compositionists picked up the theoretical approaches Of both Richards and Burke and turned their theories on interpretation into heuristics for production. Kenneth Pike’s tagmemic linguistics took a similar turn in that compositionists such as Richard Young, Alton Becker and Kenneth Pike himself utilized tagrnernics as a way to situate the invention of texts. One of the first actual studies on invention was conducted at Michigan State University under Gordan Rohman. Rohman’s “Pre-Writing: The Stage Of Discovery” (1965) concludes that prewriting—a specific invention heuristic—has three outcomes: (1) it can lead students to produce good writing; (2) it can help students utilize this process of writing to discover in other fields; and (3) it makes writing “of a worthwhile kind” (as Opposed to writing based on the traditional modes or imitations of finished texts) 21 available to more students and more students are interested in writing well as a result of pre-writing. Chaim Perlman in his essay “Rhetoric and Philosophy” puts forth many of the ideals that under gird the idea that rhetoric loses its importance, its influence, when deprived of invention (Berlin, Crowley, Lauer). Rejecting the ideals of rationalism and empiricism which can only view rhetoric as an Obstacle for thought and a mere technique for presenting ideas, Perlman argues that “The form is not separable from the content; language is not a veil which one need only discard or render transparent in order to perceive the real as such; it is inextricably bound up with a point of view, with the taking 0f a position” (53). This stance that language creates knowledge, creates content, Positions invention firmly within the act of text production. The Lauer/Berthoff debates were one of the earlier tensions developed within this burgeoning field Of composition and invention took center stage. Janice Lauer’s article ‘Heuristics and Composition” argued that freshman English, in order to “break out of the ghetto” needed to revive invention: “A few rhetoricians have begun their exodus from the ghetto. In their examination of the rhetorical malaise, they isolated the dead art of invention as a major cause Of the writing problem.” Lauer’s solution to the writing DTOblem was to learn from other fields, namely psychology, which she considered as haying been working on invention all along in the form Of its attention to heuristics. Ann Bertoff reacted strongly against Lauer’s assertive claims in her article “The Problem of PYObIem Solving.” In a mOve that strikes a similar chord as Perlman, Berthoff argues that Laucr, in viewing the learning Of writing as synonymous with problem-solving, ignores the fact that writing is an act of meaning-making and instead approaches language as a 22 Static symbol system relegated to presentation: “Teachers studying heuristics as Understood by Sister Janice Lauer will soon discover that a theory Of learning as problem- solving requires a view Of language that is signal code, a notion that converts meaning to ‘information,’ form to ‘medium,’ interpretation to ‘decoding,’ etc.” (238). Additionally, Berthoff references Freire, Montessori, and Levi-Strauss in her argument that Lauer’s heuristic approach is one that supports rather than challenges the existing social order. Berthoff argues that Lauer’s approach toward invention is not an approach characterized by newness of thought and idea, but an approach characterized by a reification of the Status quo. Lauer later refutes this, citing two major claims: (1) Berthoff simplifies the Work on heuristics being done in psychology and (2) heuristics are open-ended systems intending to stretch students beyond what they know rather than serving as tools for indoctrination. As already mentioned, Donald Murray’s “Teach Writing as a Process Not a PrOduct” became the rallying cry of this new generation of compositionists. His move of breaking up the writing process into prewriting, writing, and rewriting was a move that iInhired the writing process once again with invention. This essay, along with Murray’s impressive body of work, continually infuses the writing process with invention as he arglms for writing as self-exploration, writing to learn, revising as moments for re- inVention, and generally living a writer’s life—a life characterized by constant exploration and reflection. Don Murray is a suitable transition into the next two authors I would like to speak 0f, James Miller and Rollo May, since Murray wrote so much about the creative process II7‘V01ved in writing. J ame’s Miller’s essay “Everyman with a Blue Guitar: Imagination, 23 Creativity, Language” introduces the idea that paradox plays into the nature of invention. Quoting a Wallace Stevens poem—“But play, you must, / A tune beyond us, yet ourselves”—Miller makes the argument that writers must contend with the inherent paradox of searching inward and outward for meaning. The process of invention is a process Of pivoting between these two poles of inner thought and the expectations of the outside world: “We have but to look around us—and inside ourselves—to see how language is creative” (77). Rollo May, in his book The Courage to Create, takes a slightly different look at this argument that language is creative: “How active this makes language in the creation of a poem! It is not that language is merely a tool of communication, or that we only use language to express our ideas; it is just as true that language uses us” (85). May understands language as a dynamic tool that acts upon its user just as its user employs it (this is the same argument that will be forwarded by Anis Bawarshi’s conception of genre almost 30 years later). May goes on in this collection to discuss the “breakthrough insight” which he refers to as the completion of a Gestalt. May and Ayn Rand have almost identical ideas about this phenomenon. In the words of May: “the insight never comes hit or miss, but in accordance with a pattern of which one essential element is our own commitment” (61-2, italics original). May argues that the subconscious is at work when our conscious mind is occupied within the process of invention. If there is great enough conscious commitment then the subconscious mind, in a period of rest, will surface the missing piece to the conscious mind in order to complete the Gestalt in an elegant manner. Another argument May makes is that “the freedom of artists to give all the elements within themselves free play” (76) is the sine qua non of creativity. In a related 24 “_ ‘i Chapter on the Delphic Oracle, May argues that the ambiguous nature of symbols and prophecies “force the suppliants to think out their situation anew, to reconsider their plans, and to conceive of new possibilities” (107). Ambiguous symbols as a source for invention comes up again in the work of Greg U1mer(Heuretics: The Logic of Invention ( 1994)) and Victor Vitanza (“From Heuristic to Aleatory Procedures; or Toward ‘Writing the Accident’” (2000)). Ulmer and Vitanza both propose a theory of invention based on anti-method, play, and serendipitous accident. For May, form is also an important invention strategy. His chapter “On the Limits of Creativity” posits that creativity relies on limits, that without limits creativity can not exist—“Form provides the essential boundaries and structure for the creative act” (again, this notion of form will be discussed again, this time referred to as genre, by Bawarshi). The form of a poem urges the writer to Search the imagination for new meanings and to condense those meanings into a more acCessible mode of communication. (Robert F rost’s oft quoted adage about free verse being equivalent to playing tennis without a net comes to mind here.) Circa 1971 to 1981 saw the initial flourish of studies dealing with invention. In 1 970 CUNY open its admissions to all college graduates and its interesting to note that studies relating to invention began with a focus on marginalized, at-risk student writers (Clark, 81). Unfortunately this initial flourish of studies has not been rivaled since. In faCt, this is why my study as put forth in this dissertation is of importance: first, studies on invention after the early 1980’s have been scant and, second, studies focusing on S“coessful as opposed to marginalized, at-risk, or basic writers have been relatively absent when looking across composition’s entire history. What I’m referring to as the ini tial flourish into studies dealing with invention include the following works: 25 Janet Emig The ComposimgProcess of Twelfth Graders (1971) Mina Shaughnessy “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing” (1976) Janet Emig “Writing as a Mode of Learning” (1977) Sondra Perl “The Composing Process of Unskilled College Writers” (1979) Andrea Lunsford “Cognitive Development and the Basic Writer” (1979) Nancy Sommers “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers” (1980) James Britton “Shaping at the Point of Utterance” (1980) John R. Hayes and Linda S. Flower “Identifying the Organization of the Writing Process” (1980) Mike Rose “Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer’s Block” (1980) Linda Flower and John R. Hayes “A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing” (1981) While each of these essays are important to the development of invention within the field of composition, I want to speak to the essays/studies that are most relevant to the work I am presenting here. Please see chapter 3 for an in-depth look at the study done by Linda Flower and John Hays as well as the Nancy Sommers’ study. Chapter 5 takes up the James Britton article, “Shaping at the Point of Utterance” but I would like to note here that Britton—similar to Ulmer, Vitanza, and May—broaches the topic of invention 26 as encompassing more than logical progression alone by pairing, and exploring the relationship between, invention and spontaneity. In “Writing as a Mode of Learning,” Janet Emig writes: “The thesis is straightforward. Writing serves learning uniquely because writing as process-and-product possesses a cluster of attributes that correspond uniquely to certain powerful learning strategies” (91 ). The act of writing—viewing writing as both epistemic and epigenetic— necessarily involves invention within the paradigm Emig sets forth in this essay. The studies of Mike Rose and Sondra Perl bring to light what can happen when heuristics go awry. More specifically, Perl and Rose both note—through researching baSic writers and their habits—that the very heuristics designed to serve writers and the inVention of text can actually block writing development. If heuristics are not viewed as guides and are seen instead as dictums then developing student writers can become c"-‘lllght in their own web of rules. Perl sees this in her study of basic writers, recognizing that poor writing is not linked directly to inexperience but, rather, with the ad0ption of I"-lle confusion, selective perception, and egocentricity. Rose finds in his studies of WPiter’s block that a strict adherence to rules can block a writer’s ability to compose—the internal editor can effectively stifle and eliminate the process of invention altogether. It is interesting to view the work of Rose and Perl alongside the Lauer/Berthoff debate that tOOk place a decade earlier—Lauer can be seen as arguing that heuristics aid the writer While Berthoff argues that heuristics can stifle true invention. In this manner, Lauer and Ber'thoff foresaw the positives and negatives inherent to inventional heuristics—the fact that heuristics are both enacted by writers and act upon writers. 27 With his article “Kairos: A Neglected Concept in Classical Rhetoric,” James Kinneavy effectively revives the concept of kairos within the field of rhetoric and composition. Kairos is closely linked to invention for much the same reason that Burke’s Pentad and Pike’s Tagmernics (and even the particle-wave-field heuristic of Young, Becker, and Pike) are linked to invention—all of these seek to account for the context in Which a text is produced and takes contextual factors into account at the moment of production (i.e., invention). Kairos is defined by Kinneavy as the right timing in the right measure. Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee draw heavily on this term in their textbook Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporafl Students (2004). For Kinneavy, Hawhee, and Crowley kairos becomes synonymous with the rhetorical situation: the contextual factors Slll‘lz‘ounding the production and delivery of a text including audience, relevance, culture, Politics, power structures, the multiplicity of positions involved, the physicalities of V'Entrue and voice, etc. In this particular view of kairos (one that I will work to expand in Chapter 5) the author takes into deliberate consideration his/her analysis of the rhetorical Sitnation which in turn guides the process of invention. Kairos argues for texts as social Constructions rather than the Romantic notion of a single author writing in a secluded 10Cation. James Paul Gee may seem an unlikely member of this historical chronology but I See his essay, “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction and What is Literacy?” as a necessary component of the basic aims of this dissertation. Specifically, Gee writes: “We are better at what we acquire, but we consciously know more about what we have learned” (540). Gee is a linguist and is referring here to discourses. His argument is that prilnary discourses (the language we are born into) is acquired whereas second languages 28 c in. -~‘ ' .4 1*. n t" y D. (languages often learned in classrooms) are learned. How does this relate to invention? Writers are operating within a discourse that is learned—we are not born into a discourse of writing as much as we are born into a discourse of speech. As a result, writers are constantly struggling to acquire what is a learned process. The extent to which acquisition is possible, and the varying extents to which individual writers work their way toward the acquisition end of the spectrum has a great deal to do with how writers, in the words of James Britton, “shape at the point of utterance.” In turn, shaping at the point of utterance is a way of vieng invention. The connections between Gee’s acquisition theory, Britton’s shaping at the point of utterance theory and writerly invention is further e1 aborated in chapter 5. The Bartholomae/Elbow debates (1995) were important to how the field of Composition viewed invention fiom a pedagogical standpoint. Bartholomae argues for a Stonce in which the teacher of writing accepts his/her position of power (as opposed to hiding and falsifying such a position) and works to helps students see themselves as belonging to a particular history in a particular place in time through an emphasis on academic writing. Bartholomae’s pedagogical approach toward revision is characterized by challenging students to unpack their assumptions and criticize their cultural inheritance. For Bartholomae, students’ natural starting places—their inventional Situatedness—are problematic because they are unexarnined. In contrast to Bartholomae, the process of invention for Elbow needs much less teacher-direction and is conceived as being more personally refined. Elbow responds: “my goal is that students should keep Writing by choice after the course is over” (509). Toward this end he tries, as a writing teaCher, to get out of the way so that student move toward more and more autonomy. His 29 pedagogical approach is characterized by a scaffolding that begins and ends with viewing his students as writers. Whereas Bartholomae argues that students should be challenged and pushed in order to develop into writers, Elbow argues from a position that welcomes students into the academy as writers fiom the outset. While the goals Bartholomae and Elbow have for their students are remarkably parallel, their processes for getting their— including their processes for teaching invention—begin at remarkably opposite ends of the spectrum. Written as a response to the binary between rhetoric (i.e., writing) and hermeneutics (i.e., interpretation) made by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar in his essay “The IClea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science” (1997), Michael Leff writes his essay: “The Idoa of Rhetoric As Interpretive Practice: A Humanist’s Response To Gaonkar” (1997). The tension inherent between writing and interpretation, between heuristics and heI‘Ineneutics, is something that Peter Elbow writes about in his essay “Being a Writer vs. Being and Academic: A Conflict in Goals” (1995). Elbow, Goankar, and Leif each approach this tension from different vantages. Elbow admits to the tension and doesn’t re"silly have a response for it other than tending toward viewing himself and his students as Writers before academics. Goankar, as noted, creates in impasse between the two which either privileges the reader or the writer depending on one’s positioning. Leff, on the other hand, tries to strike a chord between production and interpretation by arguing that the classic term irnitatio refers to an in-between place of invention, a place wherein the productive art of writing and the interpretive art of reading exist synergistically. Lefi’s treatment of imitatio as a source of invention—a source of invention between heuri stics and hermeneutics—will be picked up and expanded further in chapter 5. 30 Recent work on invention has taken place within genre studies—an arena of study Which crosses many disciplinary boundaries, including composition and English education. Anis Bawarshi’s Genre and the Invention of The Writer (2003) is a prime example of how genre studies is being informed and informing invention. Bawarshi makes several claims at this nexus of genre and invention. For example, he writes: “Genres. . .place writers in positions of articulation” (9). Bawarshi views genre as the sites for invention—both being enacted by writers and acting upon writers. Genre creates a scaffold for invention and also acts upon the writer by placing restrictions in the form of genre considerations/rules on what the writer can say. Genre, like Lauer’s argument for heuri stics, are not static sites for invention. Bawarshi writes: “Invention takes place Within genres, and can be a site of conformity and/or resistance” (46). This view of genre as being a type of space in which an author can play, a space that can result in conformity as Well as resistance, becomes relevant to my discussion on genre with Stuart Dybek as disCllssed in chapters 4, 5, and 6. Bawarshi also enters the heuristic/hermeneutic, p r 0clliction/interpretation discussion that I’ve traced through Goankar, Leff, and Elbow by arguing that genre analysis should be a staple of first-year writing courses. His argument is that an interpretation of genres allows space for students to respond (i.e., 111V 6lit) to given writing events more appropriately. It is entirely fitting to end this chronological overview of invention within IIllaosition studies with a return to the work of Janice Lauer. Lauer, along with Young ld Becker (“Toward a Modern Theory of Rhetoric”), Bawarshi and Crowley 3011-1 sition in the Universit (1998)), argue that composition studies lives and dies ltll its attention to, or its ignoring of, invention. Lauer’s Invention in Rhetoric and 31 Commsition (2004) gives the most in-depth historical account of invention as it relates to the fields of rhetoric and composition that I’m aware of. Beginning with classical conceptions of invention such as Sophistic, Platonic, Aristotelean, and Ciceronian invention, Lauer moves chronologically toward modern conceptions of invention such as feminist invention, invention in the disciplines, socio-cognitive invention, and civil discourse invention among others. Lauer also provides a list of inventional pedagogies including prewriting, tagrnemics, freewriting, Burkean invention, Larson’s heuristics, double-entry notebook, journals, inquiry strategies, and online inventional strategies. The eXtcnt to which Lauer comprehensively categorizes invention across the fields of I‘hetoric/composition and English education (though not as deliberately) allows me the Sounding board needed to realize what my dissertation offers that is new to how these fields understand invention. YeS, Getting Students to Write is Invention: Invention in English Education Within the field of English education invention is at once everywhere and no"'Vlnere; it’s everywhere in that it is practiced by students and teachers alike as they uthlertake writing activities and nowhere in that is it seldom named and discussed directly as ihwmfion. For example, because English education, as a field, developed a process I3edalgogy approach as early as, and perhaps in conjunction with, composition studies it is repl etc with examples of inventional pedagogy—especially in the guise of practical ex eI‘cises. Invention heuristics such as mapping, joumaling, MAPS (mode, audience, “those, Situation), Venn dragrammrng, and writing prompts were commonplace 32 examples in my training to become a secondary English teacher. While English education is a field rife with examples of invention heuristics for application in the classroom, it is not a field with a well developed and positioned theoretical basis for invention. For example, in a course I recently completed teaching—English 313 Composition Workshop for Teachers of English—students were required to give presentations in which they share a writing strategy or approach. These students consistently made moves dealing with the scaffolding of invention although they never called it invention. Whereas invention within rhetoric and composition has been theoretically disciplined, the fields of English education and creative writing have not done the same, at least not to a similar extent. In fact, what provides both English education and creative writing its most developed approach to invention are their connections to the field of rhetoric and Composition. Because English education is epistemologically, theoretically, and practically grOlllnded in pedagogy, it primarily concerns itself with invention insofar as invention can be transportable. In other words, English educators have mined the topic of invention—— whether it be interviews with authors or research on student writing habits—to find out Wh at works across a large sample such as a writing classroom with the aim always in mind of application across a similar sampling of student writers. This approach toward Vehfion, one I would characterize as a practitioner’s approach (to borrow from Stephen N 01111), is similar to that adopted within the field of creative writing. After teaching high school English for four years I went back to school to I neentrate on my own writing. In order to fund my MFA degree I began teaching fi~ eshuman composition. It took me a few years to become interested and subsequently 33 obsessed with invention so those first couple years teaching composition are an insightful place to look in terms of how I was teaching invention. In addition to freewriting, mapping, and outlining, there was one inventional tool that I consistently took advantage of: narrowing toward a topic. Here’s an overview of what I mean by this narrowing toward a topic inventional heuristic: Day 1: I describe the assignment, handing out an assignment description and answering any clarifying questions. For example, the first assignment was most often a personal narrative assignment since I liked to move from what the students knew toward outside sources (another move that has implications for invention). Homework: Students are to write out three possible experiences that could be developed into a personal narrative. Each experience should be described in a paragraph. Day 2: I would ask students to share their three paragraphs and talk about which experience would work best for their personal narrative assignment. A list of questions to consider would be important to make collaboratively with the class and would include questions specific to this genre such as: Which experience would people in class most enjoy hearing/learning about? Which experience do I remember most vividly? Which experience seems like it would be the most enjoyable to revisit? Which experience do I think I could learn the most from revisiting? Homework: Students draft their personal narrative for peer review in which they will be sharing their work and receiving critical feedback. 34 It was a surprise to find that this was in no way a unique pedagogical positioning of invention. I had been educated about invention without being consciously aware of such education. This tradition of invention being placed within English education instruction without being directly recognized or named as invention is shown in J arnes Lynch and Bertrand Evan’s survey of high school English textbooks titled High School English Textbooks: A Critical Examination. This survey, published in 1963, examines 72 literature anthologies and 54 grammar and composition texts for content. Without any Category explicitly named invention, this survey by Lynch and Evan still speaks to a number of invention strategies such as: Limiting a subject Students write about themselves and their experiences Inquiry as an invention heuristic Present a topic/prompt for student response The use of models The development of topic sentences An analysis of genre followed by students writing within the prescribed constraints The fact that the Lynch and Evan’s study was published in 1963 makes this study a S‘~-lt'vey of more traditional textbooks within the field of English education. A survey of Q Qntemporary high school English textbooks, however, reveals much the same conditions SI"“I‘l‘ounding the explicit teaching of invention. Invention continues to be rarely named eXDI . - . . . . . . rcrtly and this is an indicator of its rather low status in the process-pedagogy 35 hierarchy. In order to review the placement of invention within English education textbooks, I have surveyed at the recent publications of three major publishers: Prentice Hall, Bedford St. Martin’s, and McGraw-Hill. All three of these publishers use “Language Arts” as the larger umbrella-category under which textbooks focusing on writing are placed. Prentice Hall, for example, places Literature, Reading Intervention, Reference, Vocabulary, and Writing & Grammar under the, category of Language Arts. For Bedford St. Martin’s, Language Arts is comprised of Literature, Language & Composition, Public Speaking, Journalism, Film, and Creative Writing. Language Arts for McGraw-Hill includes Debate, Writing & Composition, Journalism, Media, Speech & Communication, Writer’s Choice, Theater Arts, Grammar & Composition, and Vocabulary. It’s important to note here that there are three distinct categories of textbooks that deal with writerly invention: the literature textbook, the composition textbook, and the hallclbook. The literature textbook is the most canonical textbook within English education and features Literature appropriate for specific grade levels. For example, Pre=Itltice Hall publishes Prentice Hall Literature Pen 'n Edition Hi School , a hterature textbook series which canonizes readings for grade levels nine to twelve. The Way that this textbook approaches writing and invention is through the literature, SI)eeifically, through literary analysis. This text also reaches out to the current 3 . . . . . tallclardrzed testing demands places on students: “writing for assessment prepares high 8 Q11(>01 students for success on high-stakes tests.” Bedford St. Martin’s current literature 1: e3itbook—The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing (2007)— te- 1: . . . . es a srmllar approach to writing and invention by asking students to write 1n response 36 to the selected classical and contemporary readings included. The McGraw-Hill textbook, Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (2007), claims “extensive coverage in writing about literature” which aligns its placement of writing purpose and invention purpose with the Prentice Hall and Bedford St. Martin’s textbooks. Looking across these publishers’ literature textbooks, it is clear that invention is most closely wed to literary analysis. The selected readings are privileged first and foremost and writing becomes a tool on the part of the student with which to demonstrate comprehension and, ultimately, Critical thinking in the form of interpretation. In the reader/writer/audience triad the role 0f reader takes center stage; it is the reader’s task to deploy writing as a means to demonstrate effective reading to the intended audience (most often the teacher). The composition textbooks privilege the position of the writer within the r oader/writer/audience triad. The St. Martin’s Guide To Writing (eighth edition, 2008) is a prime example of a composition textbook for high school students. This comprehensive teXt provides a blueprint for writing within different genres that include (1) understanding the Writing assignment, (2) inventing a topic, (3) planning and drafting, (4) critical real(ling guide, (5) revising, and (6) editing and proofreading. These steps are repeated for each of the different writing genres offered such as Remembering Events, Writing I)l‘()1:rles, Explaining a Concept, Explaining Opposing Positions, Arguing a Position, lDI‘QIDOSing a Solution, Justifying an Evaluation, Speculating about Causes, and Interpreting Stories. Research writing and practices get specialized attention as does Wfiting for assessment that includes essay exams and portfolios. Within these Q91l‘lposition tethooks there is a perceived need to be clear, concise, practical, and e(:trve——adject1ves which seek to make the wntrng process vocational as opposed to 37 inquisitive or exploratory. The move is being made within these composition textbooks to position the process-approach to writing and invention within a product-approach. The way that these textbooks do this is to focus on genre. A survey of McGraw-Hill composition textbooks illustrates how a focus on genre considerations allows for a more detailed and, ultimately, prescriptive pedagogical approach toward the teaching of writing and invention: 12 Ea_sy Steps to Succes_sfirl Research Papers (2001) Everyday Creative Writing (2000) How To Write Term Papers and Reports (1997) The Creative Writer's Crafi (1999) Writing Essays: Strategies for Succes_s (2000) Even contemporary high school English textbooks still rely on a rather traditional approach to process pedagogy, viewing the process as a stage system through which Stlld cnts move, rather discreetly, through prewriting, drafting, revising, ecliting/proofreading, final draft. As demonstrated by the above list of textbooks which align themselves according to genre, the stages of the writing process are varied by being approached differently depending upon the specific genre being taught. While English educators are quick to realize the stages as being non-discreet, the constraints of c1 assroom education at the primary secondary levels—a push toward identifiable, quantifiable and transferable skill-sets—downplay the importance of viewing the writing pro cess as necessarily recursive. The handbook is one of the most pervasive textbook genres within English C11-1<:ation and the handbook changes very little from the high school classroom to the 38 college/university classroom (see Lunsford and Connors’ The Everyday Writer, Diane Hacker’s A Writer’s Reference, Silverrnan et al Rules of Thumb: A Guide for Writers, Kirszner and Mandell’s The Pocket Handbook, and McGraw Hill’s Writer’s Choice: Grammar and Composition, Grade 12). Common thematic elements across handbooks include: 0 Composing and Revising 0 Document Design 0 Effective Sentences O . Word Choice 0 Grammatical Sentences O ESL Trouble Spots 0 Punctuation, Spelling, and Mechanics 0 Research Writing O MLA Documentation and Alternative Style of Documentation O Special Kinds of Writing As far as invention is concerned, the most relevant categories to discuss are composing and revising, research writing, and special kinds of writing. The remaining cEltegories are purposeful in their pursuit to avoid invention since it would muddy the Waters—invention does not help one to speak efficiently about effective sentences, punctuation, spelling, ESL trouble spots, or documentation styles. The category of Q<>IImposing and revising deals the most explicitly with invention as it offers such ategres as brarnstorrnrng, freewriting, clustering, looping, asking questions, working 39 23X. ‘U’v ‘3'; ”it. . "I. \ collaboratively, exploring ideas, focusing, and sketching a plan. The precursor step to these invention strategies across these handbooks is assessing the writing situation. In other words, before invention strategies are to be deployed, the writer is to first consider the assignment, purpose, audience, and the writing situation. This is a similar move offered in the composition textbooks with regard to genre—genre becomes the center around which invention strategies revolve. The thematic units of research writing and special kinds of writing are also based on this assumption that the writer must begin with an assessment of the writing event. Research writing offers such invention strategies as POSing a research question, narrowing toward a focus, reading selectively, investigating What is known about the research, and moving from a hypothesis to a thesis. The underlying assumption here is that the writing assignment dictates the type of invention Strategies to be used. Genre is positioned as a predictor of the writing rather than a tool to be deployed in order to aid the writer’s expression. The category of special kinds of Writing follow this same tact as these handbooks speak to the genre characteristics of oral p r esentations, writing about literature, and professional writing situations in order to offer 8 . . . . . I>eQific, focused, relevant advrce to particular modes of commumcatron. To summarize, while invention is named more often than it has been in the past it i 8 Still rarely dealt with in the English education textbook explicitly. When invention is d §fillt with by the English education textbook it is done so with a reliance on genre—— g:§13~1'e becomes the necessary condition by which invention strategies take shape. This is fiyi Clenced by the fact that literature textbooks position invention within literature lalysis, composition textbooks are structured around specific genres, and handbooks Q1 g0 use genre as the departure point into invention. The interviewed poets of my study, 40 as will be shown in chapters 4, 5, and 6 do not rely on genre in the same manner as these textbooks—they approach genre as a tool to help refine their writing at a later stage in the process while these English education textbooks make the unstated assumption that genre shapes writing from the outset. The interplay between composition studies and English education is especially apparent within English education’s approach to writing pedagogy and subsequent invention pedagogy. Janet Emig is considered a central figure of composition studies and yet her groundbreaking study, The Composing Process of Twelfth Graders (1971), is based on high school seniors. James Britton, a central figure in English education and author of “Shaping at the Point of Utterance” (1980), is featured in Richard Young and Yameng Liu’s Landmarl_(;Essays on Rhetorical Invention in Writing (1994). While this intel‘play between the fields makes it difficult to differentiate for the purposes of this hjS’IOI‘ical look at invention within English education, this interplay yields constructive r eSults for both fields. James Moffett’s A Student —Centered Language Arts Curriculum GLades 1:13: mndbook for Teachers, first published in 1968 and republished in 1992 (this time recast as a K-12 text), concludes with a chapter devoted to invention. Moffett’s treatment of iInvention is a reflection on the field of English education: he begins with invention in I‘Qe‘ding/interpreting and then, as a second movement, discusses invention in writing. This QIQVC is characteristic of English education which splits its duties between the act of I“i\_:‘iding and the act of writing, a move that is not expected of composition studies and 'éative writing. One of his invention strategies that encompass both reading and writing iImprovisation. Here is an example offered by Moffett: 4l Send one actor out of the room and give a brief direction to the other that the rest of the class can also hear. The direction simply stipulates the effect A is to produce on B, by an means he can: “Maker her laugh”; “Make him sad (or unfriendly)”; “Startle (or cheer) him.” B simply reacts spontaneously. The means of getting the effect may be many—making up anecdotes, asking questions, flattering, launching into commentary, drawing the other into an exchange about a certain topic, and, of course, physical maneuvers. In the ensuing discussion, students can talk about which kinds of things actors did or did not do that worked or did not work (478). MOffett argues that “this sort of very free improvisation develops fluent invention” that can aid in writing, conversing, acting, and “perhaps even reading” (478). This attention to improvisation and spontaneity plays out later in Britton’s “Shaping at the Point of LJtterance.” In tying invention to literature, Moffett discusses “Treating Certain Literature as Q1‘ipts.” In performing literature as scripts, he argues that the reader(s) must invent their i111:erpretations through various reading strategies including line breaks/pauses, voice ihfl cction, and overall dramatic treatment. In tying invention to writing, Moffett discusses Se assignments (492), invented correspondence (493), and subjective narrator (497). E 1‘61: assignments are just that: students are instructed to write on a topic of their choosing ‘ 111 Q a genre of their choosing. Free assignments assumes, however, that “student’s bIlapositional repertory” has increased “with his experience in dramatic, narrative, and 42 poetic writing” to such an extent that the student can use such freedom as a means toward successful invention. Invented correspondence takes its inventive cue from writers having to answer certain questions: “What is going on between the correspondents? Why are thy not together and why are they writing to each other? Does the correspondence only show character, does it piece together reports of action, or does it mainly just stake out a situation? Is there a climax?” (493). Subjective narrator encourages students to develop “the art by which a narrator becomes transparent” (499). Moffett notes that failure in Writing these forms can be just as instructive as success for the writer as well as the Whole class through follow-up discussions on the effectiveness or non-effectiveness of the Writer’s efforts. Lucy Calkins’ Livingfitween the Lines (1991) is another example of a text rich in invention without naming it so. Chapter 2, “A Place for Writing and Reading” (1 1), rn«’rlkes the case for the pairing of invention with place. A similar move to George I‘Iilloc ’ “environmental teaching” (discussed below), Calkins makes an argument for getting to know students in honest ways and for allowing the space for students to inform ttheir own education and curriculum: “When children fill their classrooms with collections and areas of expertise, native languages and favorite books, they are joining us in SL113plying the prerequisite materials for writing, reading, and growing up” (14). In order tQ Create a classroom environment wherein students take ownership over their own “ting, Calkins speaks to several pedagogical approaches: writing workshop, the Ilgtcbook, rereading and reflecting, and from notebooks to projects. As far as invention is Q therned, Calkins’ use of writing workshops reflect her belief that students write best “Q‘Ger social conditions, that utilizing notebooks help students develop a habit of thinking 43 through writing, and that notebooks also help students to bridge the gap between writing to learn and the purposeful writing required of actual proj cots/assignments. There are two remaining invention strategies employed by Calkins that I will discuss here: “When We Tap into Real Reasons to Write” (106) and “Publishing Puts Demands on Writing” (110). Tapping into real reasons to write, for Calkins, has everything to do with response: “Rigor in the writing workshop comes from response. Rigor, intensity, and hard work—and, sometimes, writer’s block—come from the memory of past responses and the expectation of future responses” (107). Calkins pairs TeSponse with real reasons to write as she sees response as the result of writing. She Writes, “They wrote with urgency and rigor because they wrote about topics that matter and they wrote for people and occasions and causes that matter” (107). Calkins forwards the argument here that the reasons people write, the reasons people invent through language, has to do with the responses they get from the outside world. What’s more, the 0thSide world (audience) shapes not only why we write but how we write. Calkins’ Se’oond invention strategy—publishing—is a necessary component of the writing process eeause it “puts demands on our writing” (110). Calkins argues that the pursuit and eV’entual concluding note of publication serves as a type of glue which holds the writing DrQ cess together and helps shape the process (i.e., invention) toward very real goals and 2"llcrete ends. Without naming them so—a consistent theme in this historical overview of l\’cntion within English education—there are a wealth of invention strategies and I:\Ei<:tices alluded to in George Hillocks Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice (1995). Q Qfore I get to the invention strategies Hillocks speaks to however, I would like to 44 IL...‘ ‘4. \; .g answer the question: What makes this text an English education text rather than a composition text? First of all, it’s not just an English education text. Hillocks’ opening remark: “This book is about teaching writing at the secondary and college freshman levels” (xvii). The moves that do make this text more English education centered than composition centered are (1) Hillocks’ use of anecdotes come from his experiences observing and teaching at the secondary level and (2) his sustained move toward Speaking to how his theoretical positioning translates into a classroom setting. The reference to studies conducted in classrooms and the fact that chapters 7-10 are entirely devoted to teaching is an earmark of an English education text. Hillocks discusses invention in several ways: first, he forwards the argument that the act of writing is synonymous with the act of constructing the self. “Making a Statement in the first place requires the invention of self. We define ourselves by what we say, and our construction of self governs what we say” (22). For Hillocks then, writing is an act of inventing ourselves on the page. Speaking from the perspective of teacher, and (11.3an heavily from Vygotsky, Hillocks forwards “environmental teaching” as opposed to “presentational” and “natural process” models (55). Environmental teaching takes into account the situation of the writer in much the same manner as the case I make in chapter 8 Environmental teaching recognizes that the unique experiential situatedness of students ‘ Qall and should impact curriculum. The presentation mode of teaching ignores the S ‘ . . . . . . l‘uairtron of students by presenting information to them in the same manner that Frerre thficizes and names the banking model of education. The natural process mode of t fiat(:hing is laissez faire to a fault. This is Peter Elbow’s expressivism to the nth degree, Q . I:léiracterized by letting students develop on their own without scaffolding in place of any 45 vr‘ I JQ >~C~ .. ~.~ LII kind. Hillocks argues that writing happens best (i.e., pedagogical invention) under conditions including such techniques as reducing a task’s complexity (62), small-peer- group support (64), coaching small groups (64), and developing student ownership (65). Hillocks’ ultimate pedagogical goal mirrors that of Elbow: “In a sense that is what real teaching is all about, helping students learn to enjoy the process of thinking through complex problems because that gives them the power and the confidence to undertake new problems in new situations without the structure of the classroom environment” (75). This view of education, extended to writing, illustrates one of Hillocks’ invention Strategies: inquiry. Diane Wakoski, one of the poets interviewed for this dissertation, says “all writing is problem-solving” and I believe that Hillocks would agree. In addition to inqIJiry—asking questions and problem-solving through writing one’s response to such QUeStions—Hillocks speaks to several other invention strategies such as constraints and purposes. Constraints refers to the conditions of the writing event that shape the writing itself. There is a parallel between Hillocks’ constraints and the generative way that Bav'varshi views genre, or the way that Kinneavy discusses aspects of kairos that help Shape one’s response to a given event. Purposes is an inventive move in that it deals with how the writer wants the reader to respond to his/her work as well as how “writers may WQrk with the same set of data with quite different results because their intent and Lethods differ” (89). The last piece from Hillocks that deals with invention that I will discuss here is 12.“ 3 idea of “Inventing Gateway Activities” (149). Gateway activities are specific, teacher i I] Vented activities that engage students in the intended writing activity. Gateway 46 activities are intended to bridge the connection between the situation of the student(s) and the writing assignment. Hillocks argues: Theories of discourse, inquiry, learning, and teaching are useless if we cannot invent the activities that will engage our students in using, and therefore learning, the strategies essential to certain writing tasks. These activities provide the circumstances and support that enable them to use strategies that they would otherwise not be able (149). This statement and the subsequent discussion, replete with examples, orients Hillocks firmly within English education. Composition studies simply does not pay this close attention to the situation of the student when looking at how particular theories play out in Practice in the classroom and the field of creative writing generally ignores the Situation of the student by clairrring either (1) the impulse to write is a necessary and therefore moot precursor to writing creatively and/or (2) attention to craft rather than teacher-invented “gateway activities” should provide the occasion to write. Within and Beyond the Writing Process in the Secondgy English Classroom (2003) by Reade Doman, Lois Rosen, and Marilyn Wilson deals with invention as an i111portant part of the holistic writing process. A textbook designed for pre-service high SQliool English teachers, this text offers targeted insights into the ways English education albjproaches invention. This text offers an extensive and rather comprehensive (to date) \)\1 ew of invention including: the importance of the classroom environment, joumaling, 47 freewriting, brainstorming, listing, talk, clustering or mapping, visualization, write before writing, and planning. It’s worth concluding this section by noting that this 2003 textbook composed by Doman, Rosen, and Wilson is a prime example of how difficult it becomes to parse the histories of English education fiom composition studies, at least in terms of writing pedagogy. Dornan, Rosen, and Wilson provide their own history of composition pedagogy that traces the development in much the same manner as I have here: from classical rhetoric to current-traditional rhetoric to a process model of writing. Herein also lies the creative interplay that influences the very impulse behind this dissertation: fields 0f study become enriched through the adoption of interdisciplinary approaches. Discipline is a Four-Letter Word: Invention in Creative Writing As far as I can tell there is no end to the amount of anecdotal, idiosyncratic l.rl‘flention strategies published within the field of creative writing. This field mainly Works on the epistemological principle of mentorship where the successful writer is held 111) as an example for student writers. Countless interviews with authors discuss invention t§Qlrniques of individual authors, championing the idiosyncratic and the underlying belief “let artists must be unique in their approach to invention. Within the field of creative “ting, a field marked by an ethos of production over consumption which in turn hinders i‘IIStitutional memory, there is no discipline here, not even a structure in place under L Ilich invention seems to be a category. In fact, creative writing has so mystified the 48 ‘ 1 process of invention that it has become somewhat taboo to talk about during its one disciplinary identifier: the workshop. Creative writing, as a field of study, is rich with discussions surrounding invention but these discussions are in no way systematically collected or studied, the logic being that invention practices are non-transferable and/or innate (the result of genius). To borrow from Stephen North’s popular metaphor, “the house of lore,” the field of creative writing is made up of practitioners who seem purposefully guarded against the transference of lore into discipline. The following passage from North, even though he is talking about practitioners of composition is accurate nonetheless of the position taken by practitioners of creative writing: Practitioners do not find themselves operating in the Experimentalists’ neat world of dependent and independent variables, nor the Philosopher’s dialectical oppositions. This place is messier; cause and effect are the objects of intuition, and shadowy at best. And in this messier world, experience regularly affirms seemingly contrary truths: What worked yesterday doesn’t work today; what works in one class flops in another. That’s how it is with arts...” (24). Given the disclaimer above, namely, that the field of creative writing is a field concerned more with production than consumption and that the field is anti-disciplinarian in its focus of invention I will still attempt here a historical overview of the field given some of its more popular works that deal with the subject of invention directly or, as is most ofien the case, indirectly. 1. Positioning Creative Writing in the University 49 In looking at a history of creative writing institutionally, it may seem odd to begin with that great paramount of the Western tradition, Aristotle, but he is a rather logical place to begin since Aristotle is the first to make the lasting separation between rhetoric and poetics. Whereas Aristotle’s Rhetoric is an extensive classification and explication of his ideas about rhetoric, his Poetics is a rhetorical look at the nature of poetics containing explications of character, plot, style, the raising of fear and pity, tragedy, comedy, etc. What is important view more closely is where Aristotle makes his moves to differentiate between rhetoric and poetics. For example, in terms of style, Aristotle argues in the Poetics: The poet being an irnitator, like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one off three obj ects,—things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. The vehicle of expression is 1anguage,—either current terms or, it may be, rare words or metaphors. There are also many modifications of language, which we concede to the poets. Add to this, that the standard of correctness is not the same in poetry and politics, any more than in poetry and any other art (Aristotle 53). Aristotle “concedes” to poets the modification of language. This contrasts with his ideas on rhetoric which argue for clarity and appropriateness: “let the virtue of style be defined as ‘to be clear’—and neither flat nor above the dignity of the subject, but appropriate. The poetic style is hardly flat, but it is not appropriate for speech” (On Rhetoric 221). Here is our first concrete example which helps us discern Aristotle’s thought pattern as it relates to the differentiation between rhetoric and poetics—the idea that the poet can use an elevated language whereas the rhetor should strive toward clarity above all else. In 50 terms of invention we can see here clearly presented Aristotle’s use of mirnesis as an heuristic for poetics—in this case mirnesis of “things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be.” For Aristotle’s poetics then, style is a primary inventional tool which is not true of rhetorical speech. Another difference we find evident in Aristotle’s thinking between rhetoric and poetics is the use of fact and fiction. Whereas rhetoric should be like a building with one truth laid upon the next to achieve an intended outcome/persuasion, poetics need not be as concerned with the factual: “. . .not to know that a hind has no horns is a less serious matter than to paint it inartistically” (Poetics 54). This is the idea that a fictional representation may be more effective within poetics than a factual representation if the fictional seems more “true to life” to the audience: “Further, if it be objected that the description is not true to fact, the poet may perhaps reply,——‘But the objects are as they ought to be’: just as Sophocles said that he drew men as they ought to be; Euripides, as they are” (54). Aristotle makes some interesting comments on the construction (i.e., invention) of poetics: “In constructing the plot and working it outwith the proper diction, the poet should place the scene, as far as possible, before his eyes. In this way, seeing everything with the utmost vividness, as if he were a spectator of the action, he will discover what is in keeping with it, and be most unlikely to overlook inconsistencies” (32). He adds, “As for the story, whether the poet takes it ready made or constructs it for himself, he should first sketch its general outline, and then fill in the episodes and amplify in detail” (3 2-3). This approach to invention, from part to whole, runs parallel with Aristotle’s approach in general whether it be his explication of rhetoric or poetics. 51 The reason that I place Aristotle within this particular category, that of “Positioning Creative Writing in the University,” is that this separation of rhetoric and poetics quickly becomes institutionalized as the university system develops in the 9th century. As a result, invention is treated separately within these two large categories of rhetoric and poetics. D. G. Myers, in his historical text The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 389, posits that creative writing was first conceived as a means toward mending the rupture between the teaching of writing an the teaching of literature. However, creative writing became “anything but this integration” (4). Instead of serving as a catalyst toward integration, creative writing “was a means for enlarging the university’s role in American society. It needed no further justification: if it was no longer undertaken for the sake of integrating literary study with literary practice, it could be pursued for its own sake—free of any other institutional responsibilities” (5). In addition, creative writing was fashioned out of a need to Oppose the German research ideal (5, 49), as a countermovement to philology (16), and as a service to the movement from colleges to universities (specifically with regard to the transition from proscribed to elective curricula) (17). Myers also makes the point to describe creative writing as something “new,” arguing against popular claims that creative writing workshops in the university are direct descendents of ad hoc writing groups such as the scribler club, Harlem renaissance, Beates, etc. (12). In addition to tracing the institutional roots of creative writing, Myers spends a great deal of time asking the question: Can creative writing be taught? It is this question which has implication for the placement of invention since in asking whether creative 52 writing is teachable, the question and placement of invention is necessarily raised as well. Myers brings up several positions arguing that writing can not be taught (perhaps the most popular Opinion) characterized by principals of “hereditary genius,” “genius,” “imagination,” and “power” (39). Myers quotes Henry Allyn Frink, professor of logic, rhetoric, and public speaking at Amherst, to represent such a view: “The essential elements of literary power and beauty are indefinable, illusive; and are not communicated by formal instruction” (3 9). Other views take the position that instruction can “shorten a little the time of [the writer’s] apprenticeship” (69), that “Poetry can be taught. . .but only to poets, not to anyone else” (99), that “the art of writing cannot be taught, it can only be learned” (112), and that “writing can not be taught, but a would-be writer may perhaps be helped and inspired” (112). An early introduction given members of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop serves as an example: “Though we agree in part with the popular insistence that writing cannot be taught, we exist and proceed on the assumption that talent can be developed” (112). Robert Frost characterized his approach to this question as “education by presence” wherein the writer could serve as an example to future writers and a model for their own development. Myers also presents the view that “writing itself cannot be taught, but a discipline of criticism that is associated with it can be” (158). There is the further belief, which sidesteps the question to an extent, that the purpose of creative writing is the development of the student rather than the development of the student‘s writing. This is countered by the belief that the teaching of writing should produce writers just as the teaching of law produces lawyers (149). The placement of invention, institutionally, follows suit with the answers to this question of whether or not creative writing can be taught. 53 Patrick Bizzaro (“Research and Reflection in English Studies: The Special Case of Creative Writing”) argues that the field of creative writing should be an independent field within the university setting, citing the fact that creative writers do not wish to demystify the writing process, are against theory and practice which treat writers as if they were puppets, and purposefully anti-intellectual in thought and practice. While Bizzaro argues that creative writing should be an independent field of study, he does not argue that creative writing should exist outside of the academy, noting that he still believes differences between the creative writing approach to be within the realm of the academic approach to knowledge and knowledge making. It is interesting to view invention through this type of perspective in which creative writing is viewed as purposefully anti-intellectual. (This is also, notably, a recurring view of this field.) If creative writing is purposefully anti-intellectual but epistemologically still in line with the academy then a type of non-scientific approach to invention is at play. This is invention that is antithetical to the Aristotelian building metaphor in which each stone is firmly placed on top of the next to create an overall sound structure. Invention becomes something much more circuitous, illogical, and intuitive. 2. Writers on Writing Because an explication of every book I ’ve read that fits into this category of “Writers on Writing” would be an inappropriate sprawl, I would like to list the books that have most impacted my thinking on this topic and then move toward placing them into conversation with one another as they speak to invention. First, the list: 54 Conversations with Ernest Hemingway, Mathew Bruccoli ed. The Art of Fiction, Ayn Rand The Paris Review Interviews Real Sofistik_ashun, Tony Hoagland On Writing, Stephen King Burning Down the House, Charles Baxter The Park of a Writer. Joyce Carol Oates Conversations on Writing Fiction, Alexander Neaubauer ed. Writers on Writing, Robert Pack and Jay Parini eds. The Eleventh Draft. Frank Conroy ed. On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner The Art of Fiction, John Gardner On Writers and Writing, John Gardner Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Italo Calvino It was Conversations with Ernest Hemingway that first piqued my curiosity in this particular genre. However, Hemingway’s disposition as being literally frightened about talking to his own process makes him a less than ideal candidate to adequately cover this ground of writers on writing. Hemingway says, “that though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing” (1] 1). The most useful book on this 55 list for me has been Ayn Rand’s The Art of Fiction precisely because she is so averse to this type of fearful approach toward discussing process. Rand makes the point that a writer who is not aware of his/her own writing trajectory and development is at a disadvantage since these writers mystify their own writing processes and practices. She seems to be speaking directly about Hemingway here: “He merely grasped the general idea of what writing is, then coasted on his subconscious for a while, never attempting to analyze where his ideas came from, what he was doing, or why. Such a writer is antagonistic to any analysis; he is the type who tells you that ‘the cold hand of reason’ is detrimental to his inspiration. He cannot function by means of reason, he says; if he begins to analyze, he feels, it will stop his inspiration altogether. (Given the way he functions, it would stop him)” (7). Rand’s theory of writing as the integrating of the subconscious and conscious is both illuminating and consistent with other sources that move beyond the argument of innate talent. “The solution is always to think over every aspect of the scene and every connection to anything relevant in the rest of the book. Think until your mind almost goes to pieces; think until you are blank with exhaustion. Then, the next day, think again— until finally, one morning, you have the solution. Do enough thinking to give your subconscious ample time to integrate the elements involved. When those elements do integrate, the knowledge of what to do with the scene comes to you, and so do the words to express it. Why? Because you have cleared your subconscious files, your lightning calculator. This experience is not confined to writers” (5). Can writing be taught? Rand says yes, and no. Yes, writing can be taught insofar as the elements of plotting, sentence writing, tying observations to abstractions and 56 abstractions to concretes (52-53) can be shown to the emerging writing. No, writing cannot be taught insofar as this showing is as far as the teacher can take the student. In order to develop talent, the student must practice integrating these elements on his/her own and no teacher can force this on a student. The student must want to learn the integration of this art on his/her own through dedicated practice and play. This integration of art is to make art instinctual. Rand views the writer as approaching the task of creation with a specific conscious goal in mind—writing a specific scene for example. The writer is selective about what he/she choose to include in the scene; “Art is selectivity” (61) Rand states. And everything the artist may know but is not holding in his/her consciousness as he/she writes this specific scene is what Rand would call the subconscious (2). This idea that the writer is constantly striving to work from an instinctual, subconscious place is important because it gets behind the common phrases writers use about innate talent and inspiration. What is perhaps most valuable about Rand is her candor in taking authors that speak like this to task, reminding us all tI‘lat writing is a learned and developed craft. My first reservation about Rand: “Literature is an art form which uses language as a tool—and language is an objective instrument” (9). She extends this argument so far fllat she does not allow for any type of reader-response theory or view of language as a too] for invention. Language, as described by Rand, is an exact and static form that authors need to use with precision; in her view then, invention is extra-lingual (although her ideas about writing instinctually do not align with this view). This objectivist view of 1311 guage subsequently limits Rand’s landscape view of successful writers. As examples, ghe argues that Thomas Woolf is too loose with his language, that Gertrude Stein is 57 deliberately obtuse and that James Joyce is the worst of all the nonobj ective writers, arguing that “ He is worse than Gertrude Stein; going all the way to nonobjective writing, he uses words from different languages, makes up some words of his own, and calls that literature” (1 1). My second reservation about Rand: “If you set up a lot of interesting conflicts and seemingly connected events without knowing where you are going, and then attempt to devise a climax that resolves it all, the process will be excruciating mental torture (and you will not succeed). Therefore, in planning your story, get to your climax as quickly as possible. First devise an event that dramatizes and resolves the issues of your story, then construct the rest of the plot backward, by asking yourself what events are needed in order to bring your characters to this point” (48). I know that many authors work the other way around—in fact, most authors do not know directly where the story is going as they are writing it. This gets to some essential differences about where the invention of a Story takes place. This argument parallels Rand’s notion of final and efiicient causation, Which she borrows from Aristotle. (Final causation is the notion that specific causes are StI‘Iictured in such a way as to reach an inevitable result whereas efficient causation holds t1"181 there is a result but this result is unforeseeable and exists as a result of the causes 1 eading up to it.) This is also tied to her ideas about the Naturalistic school (efficient Q"=11.lsation) and the Romantic school (final causation). All worthwhile fiction, according to R«'EIer, works from the principal of final causation: “The only absolute rule is that, Whether you write from the beginning or the end or the middle, you must start plotting FI‘Om the en ” (50). 3. Writers on the Teaching of Writing 58 Nancy Bunge’s edited collection of interviews with authors on the topic of teaching writing is the most useful text I’ve found when trying to understand the major tensions at play within this category, namely: (1) Can writing be taught? (2) Is writing an act of discovery or presentation? and (3) Is attention to language or content most important? Although I’ve cast these tensions as questions, they are more appropriately conceived of as spectr'ums. For example, on the question of “Can writing be taught?” Marvin Bell asserts that the best poets will always be the best poets, no matter the environment, Kelly Cherry believes that both talent and genius can be taught but that it is mostly taught by oneself to oneself, Lisel Mueller argues that reading is the real teacher of creative writing, Anne Waldman states “There is no method or system for how you get to be a poet; it is very individual” (147), and Theodore Weiss relates an example wherein Writing instruction was very effective when characterized by attention to individual needs of his students (Waldman, Mueller and Stafford make reference to the importance of individualized instruction as well). The reason this question is important for invention is, as I have stated earlier, that how one answers this question relates to the placement of inVention. If one argues that writing can not be taught, then invention is relegated to i111'late genius. If one argues that writing can be taught but only by oneself to oneself, then itI‘V‘ention becomes an act of self-improvement and self-reflection over time. If one argues that writing can be taught, invention becomes firrther complicated by considering how 1best if may be taught. On the question of writing as an act of discovery or presentation I have found that Qteative writers, overall, wed the act of writing to the act of discovery. There are outliers t9 this belief—those that believe writing comes after thinking—but what I’ve found most 59 characteristic of creative writing as a disciplinary field is this act of viewing writing the way Isocrates does (words as the progenitors of ideas/though) as opposed to the Platonic view (words as inaccurate symbols which obscure the real Truth of experience). The poet Marvin Bell, for example, believes that the poem or story is evoked through the writing of the poem or story. He believes, along with poet and novelist Clarence Major and poet William Stafford, that writing is an act of creation rather than presentation. Seymour Epstein proposes that “real” writers write because they love words and language and Richard Wilbur states, “the most promising thing in a young writer is a hankering to play around with words, and that the most unpromising thing to hear from a young writer is ‘I have lots of ideas I want to express’” (175). Creative writing moves toward viewing language and words as the progenitors of ideas and content. N. Scott Momaday says, “I don’t plan it ahead of time” (91). Anne Waldman talks about “inhabiting” a poem; to her, poems are entities to themselves and a writer must be open to “receiving” the poem. The debate over language and content is linked to the debate over viewing writing as a notion of discovery or presentation and at the heart of both issues lies the placement of invention. For example, if a writer envisions writing as an act of discovery then moments of invention happen at the intersection of the pen on the page—invention becomes a dance between what has been written and what is being written. In this case, writing becomes recursive and responsive to itself. If writing is envisioned as an act of presentation then invention becomes something that takes place entirely in the mind and words become a mere service to the expression of thought. Of course, both of these processes as described can take place within any single author. I could easily imagine a writer at work, reading and responding to what she has written in order to aid the 60 invention of what it to come next. This same author, who has positioned invention squarely within the act of writing may then go on to compose a grocery list in which words are merely symbols and the process of invention takes place in her mind with the refiigerator door open to see what’s needed. In terms of the next category, language versus content, much the same is true regarding the placement of invention. If one approaches the writing of a poem, for example, with an idea about content then the words have to be shaped and prodded in order to meet the expectations of the author’s vision. On the other hand, if the author is more involved with language then it is the sound and meter which are the locations and focus of the inventive process. To reference some of the authors in Bunge’s edited collection, Marvin Bell says that ideas by themselves are useless and that a writer should be in love with the act of writing rather than the idea(s) behind writing, Wakoski argues that content must be there before an attention to language is even possible, and Yglesias positions herself on the side of content as well arguing that too much student writing and too much contemporary writing is devoid of substance. An interesting poet on this topic is former Poet Laureate of the United States Ted Kooser who writes: Let’s say that you and I are doing a drawing of that pot or that plant in it. At first, the subject is what we are trying to render on the piece of paper and our attention is on the subject. And then there comes a point, where there’s a crossing over where all of a sudden, the drawing itself becomes of interest. Where we quit looking at the subject and we begin to look at the drawing. With writing, that same thing can happen; there’s a certain amount of subject can come out of the direct observation of things, and 61 then all the sudden, it shifts into the other reahn, where the poem itself about the subject becomes of interest. I can always feel that happening. . .I start with a subject, and then I feel myself sort of forgetting about the actuality of the subject and letting the poem develop (from Guernica, April 2006). Kooser positions himself here in both camps with the act of writing beginning with an attention to content and presentation before moving away from his “subject” toward a view of the language of the poem and a view of the poem as informing itself. Again, this helps us understand how ubiquitous yet slippery invention can be as it moves from the mind’s eye to the page and all places in between during a single writing event. As far as particular pedagogical approaches that these authors discuss there are several which are worthy of note here especially for the way that these practices position invention. Marvin Bell states “one can become more and more educated through one’s art without going about it in an organized fashion” (3). This approach toward pedagogy is much different than most fields within academe and this approach views invention as a non-systematic process that requires flexibility and freedom. Kelly Cherry makes the argument that writers should seek out those very subjects of study in which they will not be the expert in the room as this allows for a development of new ideas and metaphors rather than a recycling of what’s already known. This is to position invention in a rather unique manner—invention as an outgrowth of a struggle to understand new material and invention as best conceived as the opposite of the familiar and cliché. Allen Ginsberg says that pointing out what’s working in a student poem is much more generative and useful to student writing development than mocking what’s not working in a student’s 62 writing. This pedagogical stance argues, in effect, that invention is best aided through encouragement and acknowledgment. Several of these authors discuss the approach toward writing that they want to foster in their students. James Alan McPherson claims that he doesn’t want his student to be honest, he wants them to be “cunning” (83). Wallace Stegner and Theodore Weiss talk about the importance of students recording their everyday lived experience. While maintaining that reading is a key to understanding who has come before the writing, and that reading is foundational for the deve10ping writer, Weiss is quick to assert that young writers need to be in touch with their own lived experience. This commonly repeated pedagogical theme-that students need to write out of their own time and place—positions invention in a very concrete, contemporary manner wherein the stuff of writing is as closely aligned with the stuff of living as possible. Stephen Wilbers’ The Iowa Writers’ Workflop offers a chronological depiction of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The most promising aspects of this book in terms of CW pedagogy come from the presentation of individuals who started and ran the Iowa program in its infancy. This book goes to great lengths to describe the approach and perspective on teaching CW taken by these individuals such as Norman Foerster, Wilbur Schramm (first director) and Paul Engle (probably the most promising chapter in terms of CW pedagogy in this book). This book chronicles the fact that writers increasingly became a product of—or at least in some way connected to—universities. One interesting take on workshop structure: Paul Engle and Donald Justice would meet an hour before the workshop class to talk about that day’s readings, then they would meet with the class together where the stories would be reviewed by them and the classmates (pgs. 97-98). 63 This collaboration between writing teachers before class is unique. It is interesting to note that Iowa marked one of the first conflicts between traditional English departments and the creative writing departments housed between them—at Iowa it was called the battle between “the hut and the hill” with the hut referencing the workshop’s location down by the river and the hill being the location of the English departrnent’s buildings up on the Pentacrest (112-113). “The Workshop Experience” which is the last chapter in this book (pgs. 125-136) is the most relevant to CW pedagogy and subsequent invention, discussing the benefits and detractions of the workshop method through the use of testimonials of those who went through the program at Iowa. On the Teachingof Creative Writing is set up as a question and answer session with Wallace Stegner—a professor of writing instruction at Harvard and then, most notably, Stanford (where there exists today the “Wallace Stegner Fellowship”). This text is helpful in terms of seeing the development of Creative Writing pedagogy at the college level in broad terms. Stegner taught CW for over 40 years (just after WWII) and references the Iowa program (of which he may have been the first graduate in the MA program with a CW thesis), the Breadloaf Writer’s conference in Vermont, and the Hopwood awards at Michigan. He was the originator of the CW program at Stanford and talks knowledgeably in this text about considerations of inherent vs. acquired talent, the structure of MFA programs, the structure of CW classrooms, how writers came to be housed in the college system in America, the dangers of writers teaching CW, identifying potential in writers, and whether or not CW can be taught (I would consider this the main question addressed in this text). The questions of whether or not writing can be taught has 64 implications for approaching the teaching and learning of invention strategies which will be firrther discussed in chapter 6. Most creative writing textbooks, and textbooks in general, work from the epistemological viewpoint that one can learn to create a better whole through the dissemination, explication, and practice of individual parts. For invention, this epistemology creates a type of logical sequence that is not always helpful. At its worst, a logical sequencing treats invention as if it were a physical well which one can draw from whenever needed. I sense that this is why textbooks are rarely used in creative writing workshops—they are seemingly antithetical to the type of thinking and work that creative writing is about. If creative writers are characteristically anti-intellectual then it follows that a highly regimented, compartmentalized, disciplinary view of writing would be less than useful. In my reading I have also come across very few textbooks which speak directly to the process of invention. For example, in X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia’s An Introduction to Fiction (in its 9th edition) the table of contents lists such typical categories as Point of View, Setting, Character, Symbol, Theme, and Tone and Style while neglecting the first steps of the writing process which have so much to do with invention. A very notable exception to this general tendency of creative writing textbooks to ignore invention is Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. This is the textbook that was most referenced and circulated, without ever being assigned, during my MFA experience. In addition to the traditional chapters devoted to Story Form and Structure, Showing and Telling, Characterization, and Point of View Burroway opens her textbook with a chapter titled, “Whatever Works: The Writing Process.” Speaking 65 directly to invention, while never naming it thus, Burroway directly confionts the difficulty of beginning to write: “You want to write. Why is it so hard? There are a few lucky souls for whom the whole process of writing is easy, for whom the smell of fresh paper is better than air, whose minds chuckle over their own agility, who forget to eat, and who consider the world at large an intrusion on their good time at the typewriter. But you and I are not among them” (1 ). Under the subheading, “Get Started,” Burroway gives us several examples of authors and their invention strategies. Donald Hall works on several projects at once; Philip Larkin writes one poem every eighteen months; Maria Iren Fomes does several exercises before sitting down to work; Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe work standing up; etc. She then offers several invention strategies including Journal Keeping, Freewriting, Clustering, The Computer, The Critic: A Caution, and Choosing A Subject. Burroway’s final take on the topic of invention is one that I would characterize as being a metacognitive approach: “It is not an ‘open sesame’ but a piece of advice older than fairy tales: Know thyself. The bottom line is that if you do not at some point write your story down, it will not get written. Having decided that you will write it, the question is not ‘How do you get it done?’ but ‘How do you get it done?’” (3). 4. Inspirational Starters for Writers The three most anthologized texts which I would fit into this category are Anne Lamott’s Bird bv Bird, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, and Steve Kowit’s In the Palm of Your Hand. The strength of Lamott’s collection is its unflinching honesty about the difficult and unrewarding aspects of the writer’s life. The most popular essay in 66 this collection, “Shitty First Drafts,” is about the difficulty of beginning and continuing to write. Without naming it a difficulty of invention, invention is precisely what this article is about. Her advice about invention is to accept that (1) writing is difficult and (2) to understand that others feel the same way. In much the same approach as Burroway in her textbook, Lamott tries to help novel and experienced writers alike by bringing to the surface the simply complex notion that writing is difficult: “For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.” Whereas Lamott deals with invention in unflinching frankness of its inherent difficulty, it is Natalie Goldberg’s collection that really deserves to be called “inspirational” for its emphasis on trying to fuel the flames of invention. Each short vignette is a type of kick-start for the would-be-author. As an example, in the vignette “The Power of Detail” Goldberg makes her case that the recording of detail is nothing short of a “stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency” (44). “A writer must say yes to life, to all life” she continues, positioning herself as an experienced cheerleader/coach from the sidelines encouraging writers to begin writing out the details of their lives. This is an invention-rich environment which Goldberg creates. She does not get into the specifics of how to move from inspiration onward, but that is not her intended task. This collection is meant to inspire the writer to begin the process of invention, begin the process of writing, it is not meant to steer them in any specific directions beyond that. In this way this collection is a good complement to creative writing textbooks that give plenty of information on story are without examining the impetus behind the writing. 67 The back of the bookjacket for Kowit’s In the Palm of Your Hand describes the book as offering “inspired guidance for poets at every stage of development.” What’s unique about Kowitt’s approach in this book is his reliance on the oldest invention practice of mimesis—he offers up a poem for the writer to enjoy and use as a springboard toward their own thinking and writing. For example, after presenting to his readers a poem by Muriel Rukeyser titled “Boy With His Hair Cut Short” he offers up an exercise: “‘Boy with His Hair Cut Short’ has the frozen starkness of a black-and-white Depression- era photograph, and might well have been precipitated by one. Take one of the photographs that moves you deeply: children in a refugee camp, bodies lying in a street in a besieged city, a woman weeping across a barbed wire fence, a photograph of someone being lynched or shot, and write a poem based on it” (191). Kowitt, like Burroway and Lamott, also acknowledged the difficulty of beginning the writing process. The given reasons for such difficulties include having “been convinced by their family or by society to suppress the desire to write,” getting “stomped on for their efforts” by a teacher or parent, and a lack of time “in the midst of so hectic a life” (1-3). Kowitt’s response is to buy a notebook, keep to a schedule that allows for writing time, and find a comfortable place to write. Beyond this Kowitt is clearly taking a similar path to Lamott by encouraging and seeking to inspire writing in his readers. These are the places that are most rich with invention within this text. 68 Chapter 3 Connecting Personal Experience and Research: A Qualitative Interview Methodology The overview of invention within the fields of classical rhetoric, composition studies, English education, and creative writing as presented in chapter two positions me to explicate the following in this chapter: (1) Several tensions across these three fields with regard to invention; (2) Where I enter into this conversation on invention; (3) A survey of qualitative methodology across these three fields with particular attention to methods employed to further our understanding of the writing process; and (4) My resulting research design. Tensions Across Three Fields It is at the intersections of these fields that tensions surrounding invention begin to build. I have recast these tensions as questions in order to deal with each in turn. These questions come from my own initial forays into the subject of invention. As will be evident, these initial, guiding questions morph and adopt different emphases as I work to unpack these questions into several sub-questions for my interview participants. Can invention be taught? Within composition studies, our eighteenth century inheritance of current-traditional rhetoric (which still operates today on many levels) says no, whereas process pedagogy 69 says yes. Within English education, the answer is a resounding yes but the particulars on how this is accomplished are often cloudy and vague (more lore here, less theoretical positioning). Within creative writing the answer is usually something like “yes, but only to writers,” meaning that (a) it is a result of genius, (b) the writer him/herself needs to figure out how to learn his/her own invention strategies, and (c) teachers and heuristics, while helpful, can aid the writer only in a limited capacity. If one assumes the first condition, that invention can indeed be taught, then the next question becomes: “How best can invention be taught?” Answers to this question are perhaps best characterized as eclectic, with techniques varying from those grounded in current-traditionalist pedagogy to those grounded in radical pedagogy. What roles do the purposefid and incidental play in invention? Compositionists such as Janet Emig take up this issue, trying to find ways to align the practices of creative writers and the stances taken by composition textbooks which she finds inconsistent with one another. Creative writers consistently reference conscious and subconscious thought processes in a contradictory fashion (see Hemingway and Rand). English educators and philosophers such as John Dewey broach this topic in ways that contradict some rather basic tenets characteristic of the English education approach. The definitions of conscious knowledge as opposed to subconscious knowledge are themselves impossibly inconsistent across these fields and each field takes up (or ignores) this tension. Is writing an act of discovery or an act of presentation? Writing is characterized along this spectrum—from an act of discovery to an act of presentation—at different times and places within these fields. For example, some 70 creative writers think through their poems and stories until they come out as whole passages (see Rand, Oates, King) whereas some writers use the act of writing as their inventional, discovery practice (see Bell, Kooser, Stafford). The insistence on linear and stage models of the composing process by both English educators and compositionists (as most often presented in textbooks) shows a drive by these two fields to think of writing as an act of presentation with places for writing to be an act of discovery (during the “pre- writing” stage for example). However, research within these fields have moved toward viewing writing as more discovery-based than presentational (see Emig, Sommers) by complicating the ways that linear and stage models approach the invention process. Is writing a Zone or communal act? Peter Elbow and Don Murray are positioned closely to writing as an internal, expressivist act whereas James Berlin and Donald Bartholomae argue for a social- epistemic view of writing. Creative writing, as a field, positions itself strongly in the camp of writing as a lone act but considers the workshop method—which is inherently a social act—its pedagogical mainstay. Most characteristic of the creative writing model is a view of the lone writer at work in isolation who then brings their writing into the social sphere for acceptance and/or advice for revision. English educators are firmly rooted in a social-historical paradigm in which writing is highly contextualized especially in terms of its writing as belonging to movements and historical periods (i.e., Classical, Romantic, Modern, Contemporary, American Literature, British Literature, World Literature, etc.) Where does invention take place within the writing process? Although invention has generally been infused back into the teaching of writing, it remains difficult to pin down exactly where and when it takes place. Is writing always an 71 act of invention? When does invention “happen”? Embedded within these question is the notion of evolving inventional strategy over time. This is to pose the question: How do an individual author’s inventional approaches develop, change, and adapt over the course of their writing lives? Also, how do inventional practices translate into the final product? In other words, can we draw a clear line fi'om a given invention strategy to particular outcomes in a written work? As far as I can discern, all three of these fields deal with these questions in a peripheral manner, if at all. Creative writing generally ignores issues of invention and rhetoric and composition as well as English education have only recently begun to look at invention as more than an initial stage within the writing process. These fields have not looked at invention practices as changing and adapting over time for writers. Both rhetoric and composition and English education have, however, studied aspects of invention without necessarily naming them as such (Emi g refers to “incantation” for example, and Sommers refers to “revision” both of which are at times synonymous with invention). What role does reading play in writerly invention practices? All three fields note the relationship between invention and reading (i.e., reading as a site for invention). Reading was the only site for invention within rhetoric and composition and English education from the 16’” Century on into the early 20th Century (see Ramus, Blair, Campbell). This is a time-period marked by imitation of finished texts supported by a theory of innate genius and writing as being devoid of invention and content (i.e., writing as a service to other disciplines with more readily identifiable content emphases). Creative writing still holds to the maxim of text as the greatest teacher and this position has only been called into question/complication recently with 72 the rise of creative writing classes and their underlying notion that at least some aspects of writing can be taught (aspects of craft, for example) (see Stegner, Rand, Wakoski). What is the relationship between genre and invention? Tensions surrounding theories on genre and invention range from viewing genre as a limiting structure, effectually pushing the act of invention away from the composing act, to viewmg genre as a scaffold that supports and promulgates a greater range of inventional approaches and techniques. For example, one can readily identify the contrasting inventional stances adopted by the neophyte student in his/her first attempt to adhere to a form such as the sonnet and Robert Frost’s comment about fi'ee-verse being comparable to playing tennis without a net. This tension also plays itself out in the current political climate of English education, the argument on one hand to teach form and genre as a scaffold for inventive response and, on the other hand, to teach form and genre as formula with an emphasis on standardized testing and the five-paragraph theme. Creative writers often position themselves as coming to the writing task in a fundamentally different manner than traditional academic genres—creative writing as an act of exploration, discovery, and an acceptance of mystery within the final product as opposed to academic discourse and its traditional insistence on codification, argument, and closure. How does one is cultivated relationship with his/her writing process correlate and interact with invention strategies and approaches? Writers such as Gloria Anzaldua, Virginia Woolf, Ayn Rand, and Diane Wakoski among others identify so closely with their writing that their identity and their writing become inseparable. Woolf talks about killing the “angel in the house,” Anzaldua says “I 73 am my language,” and Wakoski describes her poems as her “children.” The extent to which these authors have created and cultivated their writerly identity has profound implications on the ways in which they position themselves both emotionally and intellectually in order to invent through writing. How have the fields of composition, English education, and creative writing regarded invention as a social, cultural, and/or political practice? The field of creative writing still valorizes the image of the lone writer at work whereas composition and English education are more apt to view invention kairotically— as dependent on and responsive to issues of audience, culture, political climate, situation, purpose, place, etc. This question begs further question such as: How is invention informed or not informed by outside influences? Who gets to invent and where and when? For example, students are called on to invent on command while “independent” authors have no such demands placed on their invention practices. Where I Enter this Conversation on Invention My thinking has come to be synopsized this way: Given that creative writers are generally averse to speaking directly to invention and yet the field is so rich with invention and the fruits of invention, what I want to know is how the practices of creative writers fit into the historical context of composition and rhetoric and English education, what the theoretical and practical positioning of creative writers add to these fields, and how our understanding of writing pedagogy may be transformed in light of a deeper explication of creative writing’s stance toward invention. Using the lens provided by rhetoric and composition and English education, I seek to investigate the inventional 74 approaches of several practicing/professional poets as a means toward informing invention theory, practice, and pedagogy within all three fields of scholarship. In order build these intersections between what creative writers do and think (i.e., practice and theorize) and how English educators and compositionists work, I have set out to interrogate further this particularly undertheorized site—the use of invention by practicing/professional poets. The reason I have chosen poets is that I want greater control over my research data which takes place through the limits imposed by genre. In other words, what my participants say about invention would be diffuse if I were to open up my research to include a cross-section of genres within the field of creative writing. The qualitative interviews with practicing/professional poets are placed into conversation with the historical research I’ve conducted on invention within the three fields. These poets take a variety of inventional stances (both named and unnamed) and utilize a variety of inventional practices which enrich current invention theory, practice, and pedagogy. I have chosen to interview poets because of an initial, intuitive hunch that led me to believe poets would offer a more distinctive view of the writing process, including invention, from the practices and strategies employed by compositionists and English educators— even more distinctive than fiction writers. As stated, this was my hypothesis. Based on my experiences studying with and about poets and being a member of a poetry workshop had led me to postulate that poets practiced and approached writing in different manner than those situated within the fields associated with writing studies in the academy. I knew that most poets, for example, avoided using the same language when speaking to their process. It was as if each poet was responsible for inventing their own wheel, the 75 underlying assumption being that each poet needed to "come to writing" in a unique and idiosyncratic manner. It was my thinking that group that the manner in which these interviewed poets would discuss their invention processes would invariably display a uniqueness of thought and vision that may not have surfaced with either fiction or non- fiction writers. After all, genre has a great deal of influence on invention practice—an argument we see made time and again from a variety of sources across disciplines in chapter 2—and poetry is seemingly more distinct than, say, novels or short stories are, fiom the traditional genres found in composition and English education classrooms and field-specific journals. The next section, Qualitative Methodology in Writing Studies: Overview and Complications, provides a synopsis of three popular studies that have attempted to further our understanding of the writing process, and invention within the writing process, and the historical complications and limitations that have been associated with such studies. Qualitative Methodology in Writing Studies: Overview and Complications The field of creative writing does not concern itself with methodology. Its pedagogical mainstay, the workshop, has its own type of methodology but this is not the methodology that we recognize in the research methods of composition and rhetoric or English education. The workshop is a methodology of production, not a methodology designed to unpack, trace, or codify the steps of a particular phenomenon. The workshop is also a self-imposed methodology to elicit material from oneself to oneself—a type of elephant machine which is the metaphor that D. G. Myers employs to title his history of creative writing The Elephants Teach. According to Thomas Bontly, himself a veteran 76 teacher of creative writing courses, “The title of Myers's volume actually comes from the sneering remark of a Harvard professor, who, when Vladimir Nabokov was proposed for a chair in literature, asked, ‘What next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?’” Although this is rightfully characterized as a scathing remark, it does illustrate the point I wish to make here, namely, that the field of creative writing has a rich and ingeniously anti-intellectual methodology in terms of production—certainly one worthy of a study in its own right—but this methodology, the centerpiece of which is the workshop model, is not a methodology grounded in the same epistemology as method and methodology is within the fields of rhetoric and composition and English education. Method and methodology within rhetoric and composition and English education are I epistemologically grounded in their search for understanding and naming phenomena, in this case, the writing process. It is an epistemology that necessitates an outward movement away from what one knows individually toward an understanding of the writing process “out there” in the world at large. This is a marked difference in approach fiom the creative writing epistemology of moving inward as a means toward finding one’s voice of expression. Research in rhetoric and composition grew out of a need to inform the practice of teaching composition—research as a means to create knowledge which would, in turn, inform pedagogical practice. However, the limited event horizon of the college composition classroom would inevitably be exploded as research into the writing process yielded results for literacy practices writ large (both individual and communal) and throughout the lifespan. Indeed, “even a single instance of writing, reading, or teaching in a classroom demands (if one is to understand it theoretically) knowledge of truly 77 profound and basic aspects of human existence, of language, thought, and social interaction” (Phelps 184). The field of composition and rhetoric responded to this much needed paradigm shift—from a concentration on classroom practice and “lore’s pragmatic logic and experience-based structure” (North 24) to a discipline replete with theory—by rushing headlong into disparate disciplinary methods and accompanying methodologies. While this approach, at its best, resulted in dynamic hybrids and a new theorizing of methodological practice, this “methodological land rush” (North 317) also “opened the door to the conflict of interpretations” (Phelps 184), since at their root different methodologies represent different epistemological frameworks, different ways of answering the question: What is the nature of reality and truth? The significant point I would like to make here, and the point that connects the methodological landscape of rhetoric and composition with English education, is that both of these fields are, by nature, interdisciplinary especially in their methodological positioning. Sharon Crowley makes this point of composition in her closing comments of Composition in the University: “Composition has always been eclectic; composition teachers have almost always been bricoleurs—handypeople—who pick up bits of this theory and parts of that practice in order to get their work done” (262). It is Phelps who makes the case most clearly that the field of rhetoric and composition is a field which draws on the methods of so many related fields: “The methodological conflicts of the human sciences and natural sciences are internalized by the borrowings of composition, so that is reproduces in miniature, within one field, the problem of method that separates other disciplines” (184). While this positioning helps support my claim that rhetoric and composition is a field which draws methods from related fields, it also points toward 78 Phelps’ main concern that in drawing from a multitude of methods from other disciplines rhetoric and composition has placed itself in a very tenuous position with the problem of no disciplinary methodological identifier on the one hand and competing methodological views erupting within the field on the other. Her response to this is “the third way” in which the field must “acknowledge the impossibility of synthesis but not of complementarity, interplay, and communication” (190). My response to this tension is to agree with Phelps that the methodological tensions within rhetoric and composition are to be viewed as an asset and, consequently, a call to delve deep into the study and practice of a particular method, or combination of methods, after having been identified as the best tool(s) for the job. This attention to methodological design is presented in the final section of this chapter, Research Design, which delves into the complexities of my qualitative interview research methodology. There is a remarkable similarity between rhetoric and composition and the state of English education with regard to its methodological landscape. A 1990 survey completed by RC. O’Donnell (Georgia) investigating the structure of doctoral programs in English Education concluded with this statement: If the identity of English Education as an academic discipline depends on the uniformity of content of doctoral degree programs in the field, its status can only be described as tenuous at best. On the other hand, if it is true that there is strength in diversity, few scholarly or professional fields can claim to be as strong (p. 22). Constructing its studies as an autonomous field of inquiry is neither possible nor desirable for English Education. English Education draws from an ecological strategy in 79 order to encompass both the structure of the field and its interdependence with complementary fields. This notion of English Education as “in its curriculum, breadth, and openness of research being the embodiment of interdisciplinary study” (J. Simmons, personal communication, November 15, 2004) comes with its identity problems. How does one offer a definition of a field that is constantly shifting, exploring new territory, and claiming the fringe of itself as oftentimes the most exciting and productive parts? This is the same problem facing rhetoric and composition. When a field is interdisciplinary then the problem of content and ownership becomes an issue. In this particular case, within both fields of rhetoric and composition and English education it is clear that a lack of methodological identifiers is a both a blessing and curse; with such flexibility to draw from a limitless pool of methods serving as a blessing and an inability to claim methodological ownership and identity serving as a curse—especially within an academic system that rewards disciplines for their “ownership” over a specific set of content knowledge. There is current evidence of English education reevaluating itself as to draw strength from its interdisciplinary nature while struggling to claim a strong identity. The 2005 Conference on English Education (CEE) Leadership and Policy Summit held in Atlanta rehashed a great deal of what has been of concern to English educators since the formation of the field circa 1965 and responded to these concerns in a contemporary and rhetorically savvy fashion. One of the primary moves that the Leadership and Policy Summit made was to claim as English Education’s focus the preparation and ongoing professional support of K-16 English teachers. This link to elementary, secondary and 80 college/university teaching provides English Education with its primary identity as stated here in part of the Policy Summit’s revised definition of English Education: Central to the task of English educators is the preparation and support of teachers who, in turn, prepare learners to be creative, literate individuals; contributors to the cultural, social, and economic health of their communities; and fully participating and critically aware citizens of our democracy in a complex, diverse, and increasingly globalized world. The fi'amers of this new definition, however, are quick to extend the scope of English Education as to include “the teaching and learning of English, broadly and inclusively defined” as well as “systematic inquiry into the teaching and learning of English.” As a means to this end, English Education is cast as an interdisciplinary field which draws upon several fields of inquiry such as “education, literary studies, linguistics, composition studies, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and sociology.” The field of creative writing does not position itself methodologically in terms of understanding the writing process—at least not in the same disciplined, systematic manner as the fields of rhetoric and composition and English education. My research design recognizes that the field of creative writing—in particular, poets within this field—have unique ways of viewing invention and therefore have a great deal to contribute to our understanding of invention theory, practice, and pedagogy. The fields of rhetoric and composition and English education have taken a disciplined methodological approach toward the writing process. Before I detail my own research design of qualitative interviewing I will to take a close look at a few examples of studies within these two fields that attempt to further our understanding of the writing process, in 81 particular, invention within the writing process. My intentions here are to (1) display the methodological history into which I am entering; (2) speak to the successes of these research designs and subsequent findings; and (3) complicate these research studies by looking toward the problems and limitations that they present for our understanding of the writing process and writerly invention. The studies to be referenced are older because my research shows that Wendy Bishop is correct in her assumption that studies on creative writers are few and far-between: “Even today, there are few studies of ‘creative writers’ and there is little encouragement to conduct such studies.” Bishop continues: “Creative writing as a composition research area, then, is generally ignored in spite of cross-the—line pedagogical raiding; compositionists have borrowed effective teaching methods from the creative writing workshop—particularly group-response sessions and portfolio evaluation—improved on those borrowings and gone beyond them” (190). The initial flourish of studies on invention circa 1971-1981 has not seen a revival. While there is new work coming out on invention, as shown in chapter 2, these works are more apt to chronicle invention, offer anecdotal musings on invention, or present particular pedagogical exercises that aid the process of invention. Janet Emig ’s “The Uses of the Unconscious in Composing (1964) I begin with this study done by Janet Emig because it is closely related to my topic and research design. Emig’s method in this study is to read a variety of interviews with creative authors and then contrast these author responses to the ways in which current textbooks of the day viewed the writing process. She presents, for example, directions taken from Wariner’s Handbook, Grade 11: 82 These three basic stages of composition are almost always the same for any form of writing. Each of the three stages proceeds according to certain definite septs, listed below in order. 1. Subject 2. Preparation 3. Writing Emig contrasts this type of student writing instruction with what authors such as Gertrude Stein, Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Herrringway, and James Thurber have to say on the t0pic of the writing process and the pains of invention. Emig herself offers a synopsis of what these writers have to say about “incantation” which, as evidenced here, is synonymous with invention: “The most powerful form of incantation. . .comes from one’s own written words—sheer words themselves in clusters, islands, clumps, lists, strings, sentences. The advice here from the writer seems to be, ‘When mute or in doubt, start generating words on the page; then through examining or semi-automatically, you may discern a pattern or theme in the seeming written chaos’” (10). In placing this study within my three criteria—(l) present the methodological history, (2) successes of the study and (3) complications—it’s easy to see how this early study by Emi g is working in a similar trajectory as my own. In the widest brush stroke Emig and I both recognize the wild, undisciplined territory of the field of creative writing along with its potential for informing the fields of rhetoric and composition and English education. We are both taking in part in a process of entering creative writing’s discourse as a means to bring something back to inform the creative writing process as it is approached in a much more systematic manner pedagogically and theoretically within 83 these fields marked by disciplinary structure. In terms of successes Emi g certainly gets it right in 1964 and by 2008 we can see how much more flexible, open, and respective the fields of rhetoric and composition and English education are with regard to the writing process. Textbooks offer views of invention which are much more recursive in nature and several studies have complicated this Wariner’s Handbook Grade 11 view of the writing process as a set of discreet, chronological steps. The complications of Emig’s study are much more interesting and relevant to my work. Although Emig offers us a variety of sources with a sound interpretive response, I would argue that this variety actually hurts her interpretation. Perhaps more accurately, I argue that this study does not extend itself far enough to offer a more convincing support to her thesis. Emig’s reliance on so many author interviews, drawn from such a wide variety of sources, serves to decontextualize these author responses by pulling them so far away from their intended and initial audiences. Because Emig was not the one to interview these authors she has no way of knowing what the interviewer was trying to elicit from the authors during the interview. Emi g makes the rrristake of relying on the author responses without realizing that a qualitative interview methodology recognizes these interviews as being co-constructions. Basically, Emig takes these interview responses at face value, not complicating the interview method enough and, as a result, her conclusions can be misconstrued as opinion and intuition supported by a disparate array of author responses which she has chosen for their particular slant on the writing process which folds neatly into her own assumptions. These two main problems, that of not offering her own qualitative interview study and that of not complicating the qualitative interview method enough, are taken up in my research design. 84 Linda Flower and John Hayes’ “A Cognitive Process T heory of Writing” (1981) Whereas Emig is pulling from a wide variety of anecdotal sources, Flower and Hayes take quite the opposite approach with their method of protocol analysis which views the writing process microscopically rather than telescopically. The successes of this study are many and influential as evidenced by how often this study came up in my own study of the writing process and how often it has been anthologized. This study really became the quintessential argument against the “stage model” and its insistence on steps and chronology. Again, it is the complications and weaknesses of this study that are most generative for my own research design. There are two main weaknesses identified with protocol analysis. The first weakness is if the protocol method becomes reactive. Reactive refers to writing by research participants that is composed in reaction to the experimental conditions of the protocol method as opposed to more natural and, arguably, authentic writing (Ransdell 89). Picture it: a student is asked to complete a writing task such as that outlined by Flower and Hayes in their study, “Write an article on your job for the readers of Seventeen Magazine,” and while the students are composing they have to keep a running monologue going describing their writing process. I think it is clear why these student writers may adapt and change and react to the think-aloud protocol while composing. The second weakness is that the think-aloud may not accurately represent the underlying processes involved (Ransdell 89). This is a problem of validity: “The protocol method. . .. ...cannot trace cognitive processes that never reach consciousness” (Kuusela 388). It is also interesting to note that retrospective data (verbalization after decision making) has 85 been found to produce “more statements about the final choice” than concurrent data (verbalization at the time of decision making) (Kuusela 387). What are the implications here for a qualitative interview methodology? First, a qualitative interview methodology is in line with the aim and tradition of Flower and Hayes’ protocol analysis, namely, that of revealing and furthering our understanding of the writing process. Second, while protocol analysis does some things extremely well, it does not do other things well that an interview methodology can. For example, because an interview methodology is grounded in the fact that the interview is a collaboration and out of that collaboration yields new understandings and insights for both the interviewer and interviewee, this helps us approach the problem of validity associated with protocol analysis. In other words, an interview methodology accepts the fact that the author will not be able to verbalize every aspect of their writing process and as a result it is the collaborative experience of the interview that can help to bring some unnamed, instinctual, and subconscious processes to the table. Also, it is the goal of an interview methodology to encourage reflection and depth of thought and response to the interview questions whereas protocol analysis is an approach characterized as “on the spot” and “in action.” Again, the differences here are not to be conceived of as better or worse but as more or less appropriate to the research aim. Nancy Sommers’ “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers ” (I 980) Another highly anthologized article, in this study Sommers contrasts the revision strategies of twenty student writers and twenty experienced adult writers. The student writers were “freshman at Boston University and the University of Oklahoma with SAT 86 verbal scores ranging fiom 450-600 in their first semester of composition” (45); the twenty experienced adult writers were “journalists, editors, and academics” from the same locations. An initial move by Sommers in this article is to contrast her findings with the linear models of Edward Corbett, James Britton, and Gordon Rohman. This move helps to establish a contextual history for her own study, in effect “making room” for her findings. Sommers names her methodology “a case study approach” in which “each writer wrote three essays, expressive, explanatory, and persuasive” (45). These essays were coded for the type of revision strategies employed and interviews were conducted with the participants at three distinct drafting stages. The student writers approached revision as an exercise in “economy,” concerning themselves with cutting out unnecessary words and eliminating “lexical repetition” (47). Sommers recognizes a coherence between the pedagogical linear models the students are introduced to and the way that they approach revision: “Since they write their introductions and their thesis statements even before they have really discovered what they want to say, their early close attention to the thesis statement, and more generally the linear model, function to restrict and circumscribe not only the development of their ideas, but also their ability to change the direction of these ideas” (48). Notice here how Sommers references “the development of their ideas” in addition to revision strategies. The point I wish to make is that Sommers’ notion of revision is wedded closely—at times becoming synonymous—to invention. This close link between revision and invention plays itself out even more so when she looks to the strategies of experienced adult writers. 87 Sommers finds that the experienced adult writers most often define their revision process as a process of “Rewriting” (49-50). Sommers writes: “But these revision strategies are a process of more than communication; they are part of the process of discovering meaning altogether” (51, italics original). Whereas the student writers in the Sommers study eliminate the possibility of invention fiom the revision process, the experienced adult writers rely on invention approaches as they revise: “But student writers constantly struggle to bring their essays into congruence with a predefined meaning. The experienced writers to the opposite: they seek to discover (to create) meaning in the engagement with their writing, in revision” (51). Speaking to the effectiveness of this article, I have used Sommers’ study in my own classroom teaching to help students become metacognitively aware of their own invention and revision practices. This article highlights, in a clear and concrete manner, the different approaches that these two groups of writers employ and makes a claim for augmented pedagogical approaches toward both invention and revision. There are two main limitations of this study : (1) the experimentalist design forces participants out of their natural and familiar context as writers and (2) the Sommers’ study shows a lack of depth in portraying the experienced adult writers’ invention and revision strategies and approaches. By providing prompts to both the student and adult writers Sommers study becomes an experimental design which forces both students and adult writers out of their natural, familiar writing contexts. This is especially true of the experienced adult writers who are unaccustomed to responding to a prompt for the sake of garnering a response. This argument that an experimentalist approach has its necessary shortcomings, namely, 88 the elimination of context which helps shape response is discussed by Lee Odell et al. in a chapter titled, The Discourse-Based Interview: A Procedure for Exploring the Tacit Knowledge of Writers in Nonacademic Settings: Consider, for example, an experimental task, such as ‘Write about abortion, pro and con, for Children’s Digest, which is read by ten- to twelve-year-olds.’ This task might elicit information about strategies a social services administrator would use to solve unique tasks for which he or she has not context, and perhaps elicit as well information about global strategies the administrator uses. But it would not elicit information about the contextual knowledge that shapes that administrator’s writing on the job or about how global strategies are combined with task and context- specific knowledge to compose a particular piece (227). Sommers’ study conveys a lack of depth—especially with regard to the experienced adult writers—by the fact that she presents us, finally, with so little in the way of new insights into the invention and revision process. Her observations are aimed at vieng writing as a seed rather than as a set of discreet steps; in other words, she is countering the treatment of invention and revision as set forth by Corbett, Britton, and Rohman. This first observation is characterized by Sommers as “a concern for form” which is then followed by a second observation: “the experienced writers have a second objective: a concern for their readership” (50). Later, Sommers goes on to summarize her own findings: “Two elements of the experienced writers’ theory of the revision process are the adoption of a holistic perspective and the perception that revision is a recursive process” (52). It is perhaps unfair to claim that Sommers’ findings are initial, surface- 89 level understandings since she is writing in a time and place when even these observations were considered novel but it is still important to consider how much more depth could be gained by a prolonged methodological glare on the practices of experienced adult writers. The Sommers’ study helps to show why a qualitative interview methodology when speaking to experienced adult writers provides a more rich methodological positioning than does a case study approach grounded in the codification of essays responding to given prompts. It is the interview data that informs most of Sommers’ observations and conclusions. What’s more, it is the interview data—taken as direct quotes from these writers own metacognitive reflections—that provides this study with its insights. The codified essays merely serve to support what the writers say about their own invention and revision process. The Emig study has two main problems: (1) the fact that she does not conduct the interviews herself which limits the author’s ability to speak to her particular subject and (2) the fact that she relies on so many disparate author interviews, drawn from such a wide variety of sources, which serves to decontextualize these author responses by pulling them so far away fiom their intended and initial audiences. My methodological approach attempts to account for these problems/limitations by (1) designing and conducting the interviews myself and (2) narrowing the participant field to authors of a particular genre (poetry). The protocol analysis approach presented in the study of Flower and Hayes has two main weaknesses: reactivity and validity (with particular regard to tacit processes). My methodological approach attempts to deal with these two weaknesses by eliminating the possibility of reactivity within the writing process. Since my 90 interviews ask authors to speak to their own invention practices and approaches there are not experimental conditions which their writing is reacting against. The problem of validity, especially in relation to tacit processes, is the most interesting and can not be fully accounted for in any given research design. My methodological approach is to trust what practicing/professional writers have to say about their own invention practices and approaches and to believe that their reflections elicit accurate depictions of what are most often tacit processes. Furthermore, I have constructed questions which are designed to unpack and bring to the fore what were once tacit, implicit conceptions and practices. There are two main limitations of the Sommers study: (1) the experimentalist design forces participants out of their natural and familiar context as writers and (2) a lack of depth in portraying the experienced adult writers’ invention and revision strategies and approaches. My own study counters these limitations by, as stated previously, moving away from an experimentalist research design and lengthening and deepening the methodological gaze on the invention practices of practicing/professional writers. One methodological complication that is particularly relevant to my research study is the problem of trusting what interviewed participants have to say regarding their own, most often, tacit knowledge. Interview methods invite performances of knowledge-- my interviewees are speaking to me with a rhetorical agenda, whther they know that or not. Being clear about the tacit knowledge I'm after won't necessarily translate into the conscious exploration and subsequent verbal unpacking of tacit knowledge-tacit knowledge is by definition beyond conscious control. No matter how much my participants may want to "tell it how it really is," they may not have full access to conscious knowledge of their tacit processes--and even if they did, they would still be 91 trying to accomplish rhetoircal purposes in talking to me which impact such efforts. As a result, it's important for me to come clean as to the fact that my methodology can‘t exhaustively or accurately hope to represent tacit knowledge. I can, however, make a strong case for the interview methodology as the most approapriate methodology given these restrictions. While there is no sound way to prove in any objective manner that what participants reveal consciously within an interview setting accurately represents their tacit knowledge and tacit processes, there are strategies I’ve chosen to employ that encomage the conscious representation of tacit knowledge on the part of the interview participants. Such strategies include being an active participant in the interview, posing questions which unpack tacit knowledge, choosing participants well-versed in consciously unpacking tacit knowledge, and being clear about the tacit knowledge that I, as a researcher, am most interested in. Being an active participant in the interview: As the researcher conducting the interview it is my job to create the larger historical context of invention as a means toward identifying where and when interviewed participants are offering relevant data to the study of invention. It is my job to be an active participant through the questions I choose, body language, follow-up questions, and probing questions to make sure the time spent with an interview participant moves beyond surface level, tacit knowledge toward a reflective unpacking of such tacit knowledge. To reiterate, I do not believe that tacit knowledge can ever be unpacked in any sort of complete fashion; my methodological approach then, works to limit the impact this condition by seeking ways to achieve the best understanding of such tacit processes available. 92 Posing questions which unpack tacit knowledge: In reading over my interview transcripts what immediately becomes evident is paucity of actual questions being posed to the participants. My “questions” aren’t really questions at all—they are most often probes and repeating back to the participants aspects of what they have shared with me which serve as cues to them to speak further, give more explanation. I act as an interested listener (and in fact am an interested listener) asking them to explain their tacit knowledge once more so that I can get a better understanding of their processes. As an example, when Elizabeth Kerlikowske speaks to a writing experience in which a form of poetry becomes sublimated, becomes thoroughly acquired, I respond: “So something must have been happening. Subconsciously your mind must have been turning that form over until you had adopted it.” Her response was to take another tact, another approach toward explaining this phenomenon further to both me and herself: “Yes, but it was the form. . .let me explain it. . ..” Choosing participants well versed in consciously unpacking tacit knowledge: Although this was not my intention from the outset, it served to my advantage that each off the professional/practicing poets interviewed for this study have spent years in the classroom teaching writing. This time in the classroom has several outcomes, one of which is the fact that each of these writers has extensive practice explaining the writing process—a creative writing process that is rife with tacit processes—in terms that their students can understand. As a result of this experience in the classroom it was apparent that not only were these interviewed participants able to unpack tacit processes but they were willing to do so. Bill Olsen says, “I rather like talk about poetry. It’s one of the 93 ways poets learn fi'om each other” which characterizes his approach toward speaking to the tacit knowledge of poetry. Being clear about the tacit knowledge that 1, as a researcher, am most interested in: One of the central reasons behind my decision to choose an interview methodology was the fact that I could be very direct about my research interests with my interview participants. An interview methodology allows me to clearly articulate questions that deal with invention and the tacit assumptions that accompany invention strategies and approaches. Although I have chosen to temper my control over the interviews with an approach best characterized as being an active listener, it is nevertheless my interview questions which create the structure within which an active listening approach can take place. As an example, when I asked Bill Olsen to explain his revision process to me his response was rather extensive. While actively listening to this response I picked up on a phrase that he used, namely, “listening the poem forward.” My subsequent probing question dealt specifically with this phrase and, as a result, he articulated for me what he means by “listening the poem forward.” This is an example where a larger question served to provoke a response which I was then able to sift through for my particular interests as a researcher. Research Design I have chosen an interview methodology because I believe that my research participants have the ability to speak knowledgeably, coherently, and concretely about their invention practices. An interview methodology is best for my goals of this dissertation because I want to ensure equal footing with my participants, in fact, my 94 methodological approach positions my participants as being more knowledgeable on this topic although I provide the structure—in the form of questions—through which this knowledge is evoked and categorized. This interview methodology is situated within narrative inquiry as these interviews as co-constructed reflections on the participants’ invention processes. Simply stated: it is their narrative but such a narrative would not be told without my questions, without my planning and scaffolding the interview event. As a means toward explicating in a meticulous, nuanced manner my own qualitative research methodology I construct my approach to the qualitative interview around the seven distinct yet interrelated stages of thematizing, designing, interviewing, transcribing, analyzing, verifiting, and reporting. Using these stages as a template I will offer here a definitional understanding of each stage and how it relates to and appears in my study. My methodology begins and represents my interdisciplinary stance as some of the larger categories that follow are adapted from Steinar Kvale—a professor of educational psychology who specializes in interview methods. Thematizing For the purposes of my research study, “thematizing” will refer to two distinct aspects: (1) the methodological positioning adopted in my qualitative interviews, and (2) the purpose of my investigation. My methodological positioning is characterized by viewing these interviews as co-constructions. On the one hand, the interview would not take place without my drive to conduct them. I am the driving force behind finding the participants and, most importantly, I construct the frame, through my questions, within which the interview 95 conversation takes place. On the other hand, while my research interests begin and frame these conversations, it is the participant who constructs the responses which become the basis of the research. As a result, the relationship between the researcher and the participant is symbiotic. The qualitative research interview is a construction site for knowledge. An interview is literally an inter view, an inter-change of views between two persons conversing about a theme of mutual interest. The interdependence of human interactions and knowledge production is a main theme...” (Kvale 14). How will I deal with the products of my interviews given the constructive nature of the interviews themselves? I trust to the participants. These participants have all been interviewed before and are certainly what I would consider interview-savvy. Their familiarity with the interview process positions them, unlike someone who may be swayed to respond based on cues from the interviewer, to be clear about what they believe, how they think, and what they know. Evidence of this can be found in the transcripts (Appendices A-E) wherein these authors were not hesitant to correct me if I misunderstood, nor were they hesitant to change their own responses after further reflection. This line of reasoning provides further evidence for the appropriateness of an interview methodology for this study. Another aspect of the researcher/participant relationship is the researcher stance adopted during the interviews. As a researcher I am interested in the information most pertinent to my interview questions, however, the way to get at the participant’s knowledge regarding these questions is through attentive listening rather than over- 96 directive insistence. “Qualitative research is not simply learning about a topic, but also learning what is important to those being studied” (Rubin, 15). Again, listening is the most important tool a researcher has when conducting qualitative interviews. Bonnie Sunstein and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater refer to this as “stepping in”: “Researching people means ‘stepping in’ to the worldviews of others. When we talk with people in the field or study the stuff of their lives—their stories, artifacts, and surroundings—we enter their perspectives by partly ‘stepping out’ of our own” (345). To fLuther qualify, this move of listening is not as a fly on the wall but, rather, as an engaged, active participant in the conversation. Probing questions and body language become important during this stage of active listening in which the participant must know that the researcher is wholly invested in what he/ she has to say. Another aspect of my methodological positioning has to do with my epistemological approach. In sum, it is my belief that these interviews offer complexity rather than control, nuanced understanding rather than comprehensive explanation. This epistemological positioning is a strength inherent to the qualitative interview method: “it is in fact a strength of the interview conversation to capture the multitude of subjects’ views of a theme and to picture a manifold and controversial human world” (Kvale 7). If I were to interview a world class chess player about her preparation for an upcoming tournament, I would need to demonstrate my knowledge of chess before she could be expected to engage in such a conversation. The same is true when interviewing practicing/professional writers about their invention strategies; I must demonstrate a type of expertise in the area under discussion if I am expecting them to thoughtfully respond to my questions on invention. “In an interview inquiry, a substantial familiarity with the 97 theme and context of the inquiry is a precondition for the expert use of the interview method” (Kvale 108). I have established rapport with the participants in my study by being an MFA student, participating poetry workshops for the past two years at Michigan State, and currently being a member of a poetry group. James Spradley references the notion of “Thorough Enculturation” with an eye toward the participants in a given study. “Good informants know their culture so well they no longer think about it” (47). The argument stands that the participants being interviews must be knowledgeable to the point of sublirnating this knowledge if they are to be useful to the study. All of my participants are practicing/professional poets with years of experience living the writer’s life. This somewhat numinous phrase, “the writer’s life,” refers to the fact that these writers are active members of writing groups and consider writing to be a central part of their daily routine and identity. Spradley names this active involvement in what I’m referring to as “the writer’s life” as “current involvement” and makes the argument that researchers should limit there contributing participants to those that are currently enculturated in the subject being researched. “When people are currently involved in a cultural scene, they use their knowledge to guide their actions. They review what they know; they make interpretations of new events; they apply their knowledge to solving everyday problems. When people stop using some part of their cultural knowledge, it becomes less accessible, more difficult to recall” (48-49). Designing 98 “The key issues of the interview concern what, why, and how: what—acquiring a prekrrowledge of the subject matter to be investigated; why—formulating a clear purpose for the interview; and how—being familiar with different interview techniques and deciding which to apply in the investigation” (Rubin, 126). Now that I have set the stage for the what—positioning myself as an informed insider as well as providing and in- depth historical overview of invention; and the why—providing my research focus; it is time to explicate the how. To begin with, let us look at the focus questions within my qualitative interview research design: 1. What is the relationship between writerly identity and invention? 2. In what ways do individual invention strategies and approaches evolve? 3. What is the relationship between genre and invention? 4. What role do the purposeful and incidental play in invention? 5. What is the correlation between invention and the finished writing product? 6. What are the pedagogical implications of this interview data for inventional theory and practice? If the goal is “being familiar with different interview techniques and deciding which to apply in the investigation” then, starting with these focus questions, I need to create a categorical list of questions which will help me co-construct responses with my participants. The following table names the categories of the questions I will be asking my participants. Each category will then be defined and examples will be given. 99 1. Closed and Open Questions 2. Concept Clarification/Native Language Questions 2.1. Included Term Questions 3. Grand Tour Questions 3.1. Mini-Tour Questions 4. Hypothesis Questions 5. Probing Questions 6. Direct Questions 7. Structuring Questions 8. Silence is Golden 9. Interpreting Questions 1. Closed and Open Questions questions. Definition: Closed questions, generally speaking, can be answered with one word such as “Yes” or “No.” Open Questions, on the other hand, are not able to be answered with one word. Closed questions are important when trying to ascertain the same information across a sampling such as surveys for example. Closed questions are also important in terms of trying to relate one participant response to another. Open questions are most common within qualitative interviews since they are naturally self-directed responses on behalf of the participant(s). For further examples of open ended questions see grand tour Examples of Closed Questions: Do your write at the same time each day? Do you use a pen or computer to compose? Examples of Open Ended Questions: 100 0 What role does the incidental (i.e., subconscious) play in your writing? 0 To your thinking, which aspects of writing can and can not be taught? 2. Concept Clarification/Native Language Questions 2.1. Included Term Questions Definitions: Concept clarification/Native Language Questions are designed for two specific purposes: (1) to limit the amount of translation the researcher has to conduct and (2) to create a common understanding of terms between the researcher and participant during the interview. Included term questions in which the researcher uses a term brought up by the participant within a subsequent comment or question are a way to make sure to test whether or not these two aims are being met. Examples of Concept Clarification/Native Language Questions: 0 Talk to me more about how you understand Emily Dickinson’s notion of “slant.” 0 How do you conceptualize invention? Examples of Included Term Questions: 0 Would you say that your particular “slant” has moved from being raw energy toward becoming more critically aware over the years? 0 If invention for you is something that helps to get you thinking in a particular way then can you tell me some of the invention heuristics that you employ in order to accomplish this? 3. Grand Tour Questions 3.]. Mini-Tour Questions Definitions: Grand Tour and Mini-Tour questions are designed to simulate the experience of an activity—from start to finish—for the researcher. The Mini-Tour questions usually lOl come as a result of a response to a Grand Tour question. Mini-Tour questions pick a specific activity within the larger activity to focus on. Example of Grand Tour Question: 0 Take me through a typical day of writing for you. Example of Mini-T our Question based on the response given to the Grand Tour question: 0 I noticed that often usual visual cues such as looking out your window or leafmg through a magazine to help get you started writing—Can you take me through this activity step-by-step? 4. Hypothesis Questions Definition: Hypothesis questions are designed to enact conversation and language (this gets to native language) between identities that are not represented in the researcher/participant relationship. For example, one of my interests is in how my participants conceptualize the teaching of invention. If I want to get at the particular language he/she employs when working with students, or the way he/she conceptualizes student thinking, I would ask the following questions: Examples: 0 If a student came to you with a question about how to come up with ideas worth writing about what would you tell her? 0 What do you think is most difficult for students when it comes to finding something to write about? 5. Probing Questions Definition: These are reflexive questions that are asked when something of particular interest to the researcher is posed by the participant. Probing questions are a way to help 102 structure an interview, get into depth with regard to the interview topic, and show consistent interest in what the participant is discussing. Examples: 0 What do you think having a quiet place to work does for you? 0 Why do you avoid grammatical concerns altogether when drafting? 0 I’ve never heard of a writing process like that before, tell me more about it. 6. Direct Questions Definition: Direct questions are less open to participant interpretation because the phrasing of the question directs the response by providing contextual boundaries. These questions are closed questions by nature and generally seek a type of “yes or no” response. Examples: ‘0 Can you teach invention to your students or do they have to learn it on their own? 0 What percentage would you assigr to talent and what percentage would you assigr to practice in terms of your own development as a writer? 7. Structuring Questions Definition: These are less questions and more directing of the interview by the researcher. If the conversation turns toward a topic that is irrelevant to the research questions then the researcher has to employ stock phrasing to end that particular line of conversation and begin another that is relevant to the focus questions. Examples: 0 That is interesting but I was hoping we could return to this question of. . .. 0 Another topic I’m interested in deals with. . .. 103 8. Silence is Golden Definition: This is a term I think of often when teaching. After asking a question to my students I have to remember to give them time to respond. Neophyte teachers have a habit of avoiding silence at all cost and will all too quickly answer their own questions. Students are quick to pick up on this and will simply wait for the teacher to continually pose and answer his own questions. The same holds true in an interview—silence is important in order to give the participant time to construct a response. 9. Interpreting Questions Definition: Interpreting questions are much like Included Term questions in that the researcher is rephrasing something that the participant has said in an effort to gain further rmderstanding of the topic and be certain of a common understanding. An interpreting question is a rephrasing of what the participant has volunteered given back to him/her for the purposes of agreement, disagreement, or firrther clarification. Examples: 0 When you are looking at an image as a type of invention heuristic then, you find that this image is a starting point and does not reverberate directly through the finished written product? 0 I hear you saying that invention for you takes place throughout the writing process. There are three more important points to make that deal with the desigi of this qualitative interview research project. First, it is my contention that less is more with regard to the number of participants employed in this project. While I want to overview 104 invention practices and theory across participants to show variety, I am not trying to present universal trends or patterns. My interest is in discovering and exploring the sheer number of different invention strategies employed by these writers. With this in mind, the amount of conversational depth I can achieve with each participant is a more relevant concern than the breadth and variety of interview participants. Second, I am structuring the interviews one person at a time as opposed to two or three. My reasons for this are similar to the reasons for focusing on depth rather than breadth: I am more interested in idiosyncratic thoughts and practices on invention as opposed to agreed-upon trends and patterns. Third, I have chosen to ask questions that are much more theoretical in nature as opposed to questions that examine these writers’ actual texts. I do not ask questions such as “When you have X on a page, what do you do?” or “Tell me how your invention strategy operated when you wrote X.” I chose not to pose such text-bound question because I wanted the information that these questions are after to be evoked by the writers themselves. For example, each of the writers interviewed were quick to reference particular works of their own when speaking to their invention practices. Rather than me providing the X on the page for them to discuss, they provided the X on the page themselves. Stuart Dybek revealed immediately that his invention strategies were tied directly to what he was writing: “ It varies so much that it’s hard to generalize about. It depends on what I’m working on.” Dybek went on to describe his current project and the implications that a specific project held for his invention process. At one point in my interview with Diane Wakoski she got up from the table to find a copy of a recently drafted poem. She read this poem aloud as a means toward unpacking the invention 105 practices and approaches she had utilized. Diane Seuss offered a poem as an example—— “What My Son’s Haircut Taught Me About Flying”—and used this poem as a catalyst for talking through her invention process which began this way: “So that’s what I knew when I sat down: haircut, that feeling, two-headed lamb, that image, fear of leaving the earth. That’s what I knew.” Perhaps most telling about the ways these writers conceptualize invention is the pull they felt toward concretizing their invention processes in our discussions—the fact that each of these authors, in their own way, gravitated toward the illustration of invention through specific written works. What’s also telling about the ways these writers conceptualize invention is that they were best able to reflect, conceptualize, and speak to their invention processes through the sharing of current projects. A case can be made for invention being most visible when it is most necessary and immediately being enacted. Presenting these writers with pre-formulated, text-bound questions related to invention would have, I argue, opened the door too wide into hindsight speculation whereas the immediacy of their current writing projects allowed these writers to speak directly and more accurately to their invention processes. When I asked Elizabeth Kerlikowske, “What other [invention] strategies do you use?” her response, in line with the way that thinking about invention operates for the other writers, was to reference a recent day of writing: “I’m so glad you asked that question because I was just writing a poem today ' and. . . .” Finally, rooting the interviews in theoretically bound questions evoked examples on the part of these authors which I never could have conceived of pre-interview— examples which were more illustrative of their invention practices by virtue of the fact that they were self-selected by these interviewed authors. 106 Interviewing The act of interviewing is conducted with several guidelines in mind. First, the interviews are consciously constructed by the researcher to resemble ordinary conversations. My argument is that ordinary conversations allow for optimal insight into the thoughts and practices of these authors as opposed to interviews structured as regimented question/response sessions or, on the other end of the extreme, interviews that are conducted around vague and nebulous questions without grounding in the particular context of the participant. In order to target this point between regiment and ambiguity, I employ a type of “structured flexibility” which depends upon my knowledge of the topic at hand and my knowledge and ability to employ a multitude of methodological options. Examples of such methodological options include the various types of questions at my disposal and the ability to “read” and subsequently structure an interview with the help of heuristics such as contextualizing the interview for a participant and employing various methods such as being aware of body language. Another method to be employed in order to achieve such structured flexibility is “Deliberate Naiveté.” Deliberate naiveté refers to researcher as being both presurnptionless and critically conscious of his own presumptions. The argument here being that presumptionless, while being an admittedly an unattainable ideal, is the position toward which the researcher should strive in order to open oneself up to all possibilities presented through the qualitative interviews conducted. On the other side of 107 the coin, the researcher needs to be aware of his/her presmnptions in order to best navigate around and through them. T ranscribing James Spradley notes two aspects of transcription that are central to my particular approach: the language identification principle and the language verbatim principle (71- 74). The language identification principle is the idea that each participant will use language in a unique manner to describe his/her own writing process and inventional approach. The language identification principle holds that this unique use of language should be preserved in the transcription process. The language verbatim principle supports and works in conjunction with the language identification principle by putting forth the notion that participant language should be recorded verbatim as opposed to translated into more universal language by the transcriber/researcher. In order to aligr my work with both of these principles—principles which support my underlying belief in the sharing of unique, nuanced approaches and practices of invention—I have recorded each interview and have used transcription software. to aid the process of transcribing word- for-word as opposed to such practices as maintaining field notes which can not account for every utterance. Even though my transcription process is wholly inclusive of every word, the fact that transcription is still a process of interpretation on the part of the researcher can not be understated. The most difficult aspect of transcripting, for example, is the fact that body language and word emphases are lost. Where should punctuation be placed? How can sarcasm be conveyed? In the end, the act of transcripting is an act of interpretation. With ‘ DragonNaturally Speaking voice recognition software 108 this in mind it is important to constantly reference the fact that the transcriptions are not the original data; the live conversations are the data. Analyzing The difficulty of analysis is related to the research design. In fact, Steinar Kvale states: “Put strongly, the ideal interview is already analyzed by the time the tape recorder is turned off” (178). The idea here is that the interview questions and sub-questions are so thoroughly analyzed and coherent that the preparation for the interview has aided directly in the analyzing of the interview transcripts. Treating this relationship between the desi g1 of the research questions and the subsequent analyzing as a given, there are still several methods to be employed when analyzing the interviews and transcripts such as meaning condensation, meaning categorization, narrative structuring, meaning interpretation, and ad hoc methods of analysis. I will briefly discuss each in turn. Meaning condensation (Kvale 192) is the act of summarizing long bits of transcript text into shorter bits while maintaining the integity of the original transcript. This is a necessary and usefirl analysis tool since interview transcripts are such expansive texts. Meaning categorization (Kvale 196) results in the formulation of tables and other such categorical formulations. This analysis procedure usually deals with coding meaning within the transcripts. For example, if I wanted to code my data I could note every time a participant related to me a distinct invention practice. As a result of such coding, I could create a table that would show how many discreet invention strategies each participant drew from in our conversations. 109 Narrative structuring (Kvale 199) is perhaps the central analysis heuristic to be used within this research project. Since my interviews are done with participants who are not in conversation with one another, my analysis has to place these participants into conversation not only with one another but into conversation with the historical research I’ve completed. In other words, this is a move toward creating a context for participant responses; this act of creating a context is also an act of analysis. As Kvale indicates, “The analysis may also be a condensation or a reconstruction of the many tales told by the different subjects into a richer, more condensed and coherent story than the scattered stories of the separate interviewees” (199). Meaning interpretation is closely related to narrative structuring in that “The interpreter goes beyond what is directly said to work out structures and relations of meaning not immediately apparent in the text” (201). For my particular research project, meaning interpretation will most often rise from the connections being made between participant responses and the historical research on invention within the fields of rhetoric, composition, English education, and creative writing. Lastly, it is the ad hoc methods (Kvale 204) that leave room for flexibility and ingenuity of analysis. These methods range from clustering and making contrasts/comparisons to counting and moving chronologically. One of my personal ad hoc methods is the placement of my participant interview data into conversation with published, existing interviews. Verzfiing The main form of verification is the act of posing follow up questions to interviews in order to further elicit responses which speak to my focus questions. Second, 110 it’s important to share with participants as well as readers my methodological claims and positioning—in other words, to lay my methodological cards on the table by being forthcoming as to my methods for desigring, interviewing, and analyzing. Lastly, validity is a sigrature of quality of craftsmanship. It is important to make sure each step of the interview process is coherent and aligred with every other step in this qualitative interview research project. Reporting What I would like to most concentrate on here is the fact that in reporting my research findings I am drawing from a narrative approach and tradition. The overall design of this qualitative research project and the reporting out of research findings has been constructed within a narrative framework which relies on methods such as interpretation, summary, and bringing discreet interviews into conversation with one another as well as into conversation with outside texts. Second, the reporting of research findings has to answer reader questions regarding methodology. This chapter is designed to do this; I have tried to elucidated here the answers to possible questions regarding my research themes, desigr, interview practices, transcription, analysis, verification, and reporting. lll Chapter 4 Speaking With Poets: Invention Strategies and Practices I have conducted qualitative interviews with five practicing/professional poets. These poets are Diane Wakoski, Elizabeth Kerlikowske, Bill Olsen, Stuart Dybek, and Diane Seuss. Diane Wakoski has published over forty books of poetry and her honors include a Fulbright fellowship, a Michigan Arts Foundation award, and grants fiom the Guggenheim Foundation, the Michigan Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. She has been living and teaching in East Lansing, Michigan since 1976. Her classes are notorious among the student body at Michigan State University for being demanding. Her teaching and writing reflect an honest mind at work in search of accuracy without regard to how that approach results in student admiration, fear, or disdain. Our conversation was a long one——close to three hours—and resulted in copious pages of transcription. We spoke at her home in East Lansing at the dining room table where she holds bi-monthly poetry workshop meetings with groups comprised of past students she has formed over the years. At the end of our conversation she thanked me for allowing her the “indulgence” of speaking so “egotistically.” 112 Elizabeth Kerlikowske has published three books of poetry and numerous poems in a wide variety of journals. She teaches at Kalamazoo Community College and is a self- described “poet of the community.” She commented in our conversation that “I like to have people who are not overly educated be able to understand my poems. I think that’s part of my mission in this life. . ..” Toward this end she has been the president of Friends of Poetry, a small non-profit organization existing to promote the appreciation of writing and poetry. For the past fifteen years she has also worked with Creative Writing in the Schools. A rebel by choice, she writes: “I‘ve spent most of my life rebelling against my upbringing in a WASP neighborhood in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I was fortunate enough to come of age during the Civil Rights Movement which (for me) segued into the Anti- war Movement which led to the Women's Movement which led me to graduate school. I now teach English at Kellogg Community College. I'm the mother of three, one of whom was planned.” Our conversation took place in a coffee shop of her choice in Kalamazoo where she was greeted by the wait staff as a regular. Bill Olsen is the author of three books of poetry and the recipient of an NBA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Nation/Discovery Award, the Texas Institute of Arts Award, a Breadloaf Fellowship, and poetry awards fi‘om Poetry Northwest and Crazyhorse. He teaches at Western Michigan University and the MFA Program at Vermont College. We met at Main Street Grill in Kalamazoo and I drank cold beer while he drank hot tea. More than any other interviewee Bill worked to put together coherent sentences that would transfer directly to the page. He has a soft, introspective demeanor and a natural tendency to push beyond a surface-level understanding of things. We spoke in the back corner of the restaurant/bar where, thankfully, the large-screen television at 113 his back was set to mute. While speaking his hands were rolling and silently tearing every piece of paper within reach from his napkin to the Lipton’s paper teabag container. Stuart Dybek spoke to me by telephone from the Florida Keys. I caught up with him while he was waiting for a fiiend to pick him up to go fishing. Dybek was recently awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the "genius award" that gives individuals selected for "extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits" a $100,000 grant annually for five years. He has an MFA fiom Iowa and currently teaches at Northwestern University after more than thirty years of teaching at Western Michigan University where he served as the director of my master’s thesis focusing on fiCtion and poetry. It was Dybek who first helped me understand what it meant to think like a writer and our conversations are typically easygoing and insightful. He writes emails without capitalizing a single letter and describes his writing process as “instinctual” even though he is able, with minimal prompt, to articulate extensively and coherently about his process. Diane Seuss has been teaching writing at Kalamazoo College “for nine-thousand years.” She is the author of the poetry collection It Blows You Hollow (New Issues, 1998). Her poems have been anthologized in Sweeping Beautv: ContemporalWomen Poets Do Housewofirk, Are You Experienced? @v Boom Poets at Midlife, and B_oo;n_er Girls: Poems by Women fi'om the Baby Boom Generation, all from the University of Iowa Press. Seuss’s work has recently appeared in The North American Review, Indiana Review, Cimarron Review, and The Georgia Review. We spoke at a coffee shop in the heart of Kalamazoo on the red-letter day that she finally caught her cyber-stalker who had been emailing her several nasty emails daily over the course of the previous months. 114 After collecting and transcribing these interviews I was left with pages upon pages of data. My next task was to code this data; in other words, I had to look across these pages of interview transcripts for categories that helped make sense of the information I had acquired. I balked. I considered several different ways to make my way into these interviews but none of them seemed to be capable of representing them—their energy and complexity—— in a sufficient, if even acceptable, manner. Stuart Dybek’s admission that he will “do most anything to escape from first draft” suddenly felt like my words, my position. Eventually I realized that I had to simply make an attempt no matter how much it felt like wielding a sledgeharnmer at a tea party. My first attempt was to structure an attempt that was as close to attempt-less as possible. I relied on very large, comprehensive categories such as “Invention Practices” and “Invention Approaches.” The logic being that large categories were less invasive and therefore less capable of disrupting the energy and complexity of the interviews. After sharing this initial surface-level foray into categorization and analysis I was encouraged to push “toward more precise and finer grained ways of fi'aming the categories” (Smith). I agreed in principal but was still lost on how to do this practically. I imagined, quite literally, a pile of golden gains of sand perfectly standing in a pyramid structure and felt as though if I began to pull gains from the pile for analysis then the entire structure would fall in on itself in a great landslide. Never before had I experienced the qualitative truism that these interviews were going to be co-constructions. It may be their responses but they are responses to (1) my questions 115 and (2) my coding. My questions and coding represent two filters, two frames, through which these interviews will be presented. It is my aim in this chapter to present a global picture of these interviews as well as a more localized, in-depth view. Chapter 5 will then offer further analysis of what these poets say about invention within the larger context of the three fields of creative writing, rhetoric and composition, and English education as well as my own personal experience. I intend to pick up similar gains of sand and place them into categories and pick. out gains of sand that are dissimilar in order to recogrize tensions and differences. Robert Frost famously quipped: “Free verse is like playing tennis without a net.” His argument is that the scaffold provided by prosody allows the writer to reach gound he/she may not have otherwise been able. It is my hope that such a traditional move toward explication and categorization will not reduce the energy and complexity of the original interviews but provide a sharper, more flexible and nuanced frame for the reader. Getting Started This section deals with what is perhaps the most commonly recogrized aspect of invention—that of facing down the blank page. These strategies, as shared by these authors, are practices they employ to begin the writing process fiom scratch. The argument that invention is involved in the process of revision is made in the second section of this chapter. This section defines invention (i.e., provides a frame for viewing invention) as the act of beginning writing. This comes in the form of thinking up ideas, 116 getting words onto the page initially—in other words, generating ideas and generating text. This view of invention as starting from scratch is the traditional flame placed on invention in the academy across the fields of English education and rhetoric/composition. 1. Visual Images as Prompts Diane Wakoski recogrized one invention practice—waiting for inspiration—as being unsuitable since it did not conform to her “acceptable realm” of poetry production. She also recogrized early on in her writing career that she was visually stimulated. The logistics of invention—the fact that she simply didn’t have the time to afford not writing—along with this metacogritive recogrition that she was visually stimulated, led her to develop an invention process that utilized on visual images from Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia. When I had my most punishing job working at the British book Center for the first few years I was in New York City in the 508 I did find a block of time so I am somebody that likes a block of time. I took a lunch hour, I just didn’t eat lunch, I took a lunch hour and walked over to the New York Public Library across from the Museum of Modern Art and I made a beeline for the reference room and I knew I had to instantly be thinking of something and I discovered that if I opened Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia and opened it at random I would eventually find a picture that I could sit down and start writing about because I am visually stimulated. 117 Wakoski continues to speak to this particular invention strategy of using images as a way to stir the emotions necessary to write: .. .that was the reason that I had to invent the Compton’s pictured Encyclopedia ploy because I had to sit down and write even though nothing emotional was impacting me or I wouldn’t get anything written so I needed it to get me to that place where all of a sudden I have an emotional reaction—anger, hatred, tenderness, sensuality—and these emotions start frmctioning and then I could write through that. And that’s where my poems have to come from, the writing doesn’t have to come from that but the poems have to come from that. I had to be inventive when I couldn’t just wait until I have something to say. I couldn’t just wait for inspiration or I might write one poem a year and that wasn’t in my acceptable realm. As Wakoski moved away from New York City and away from the Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia on which she would rely, her invention strategy moved from viewing physical images to recalling mental images. ...now I’ve got this set time, or I try to do some writing every day. . .I always have that same view. So, it’s like my going to the Donnell Library when I was in New York and having my less than an hour lunch break and going directly to the Compton’s Encyc10pedia. Well, that’s my library but this is Compton’s 118 Encyclopedia and I have all these visual images that don’t mean anything but are just there with resonance. So now I can spin a poem out of them. . .. It’s useful to see how Wakoski moves from resonant images to a series of question asking in an effort to unpack the reasons behind such resonance. For Wakoski, this marks the beginning of a poetry exploration. Well you know again to go back to this Linden trees poem, I have asked myself for years, because one of the firings I do when I sit down to write a poem if I don't have a specific thing to present or something that's happened to me, you know, I scroll through my scrapbooks of visual images which are infinite. And this is an image which comes back to me frequently. I keep asking myself why. Is this just at the top of the page? Did something happen and I don't remember? I think the answer is no. Did you connect it with something else? Well, probably many things over the years about trees, but maybe not about trees, maybe about the movement, not even leaves but that constant movement that they represent. Why is that constantly visually there as trees? I think that in that sense the subconscious can be a locator of possible poem material. In all fairness I wouldn't have started working with it had I not been sitting there at that window in March seeing all the trees green-leaved. Wakoski’s most crurent invention practice is to scroll through her scrapbook of emotional moments to find tensions and mysteries which offer fertile gounds for poetry 119 investigations. This strategy of invention through the visual takes place across the practices of scrolling the physical pages of Compton’s Encyclopedia, scrolling the visual images of memory while looking out the same window at consistent times of day, and scrolling “emotional frozen moments with people.” I’ve started doing another kind of invention that again starts with looking for a poem to write so I call up one of my scrapbook images and this one is an image of. . .and this one does have an emotional connotation for me. When we were at the Vermont writer’s center Robert and I were in the tavern near the center one night as we usually were and sitting there and I saw in the doorway, in the screen door, what I was sure was Galway Kinnell and he looked in and then all of a sudden saw me and went away. Well that keys into Diane’s rejection [laughter]. Over the years it has occurred to me that I made it up, that it was someone just looking in the door, I have terrible eyesight anyway. It could be a million explanations but it’s always something I scroll past, I never wrote about it. I didn’t think I was going to write about it and I didn’t. In the first draft of my poem about a face that looked like a hatchet and I was thinking of Galway’s face which is broad and flat that was stuck like the blade of an axe in the doorway. Well it drove everybody crazy, and the first version was the best, and it wasn’t until I really started working out what I was trying to do, and I still don’t think I’m there, but that one drove me crazy and it came from that image. And I didn’t want to write about Galway Kinnell and then I wrote a real explanatory version and it was awful but, you know, it was getting me someplace. I think what I have 120 started doing is, in the same way that I have the scrapbook of images like the afternoon plaza in Spain with the Linden trees, I have images of emotional frozen moments with people. I tried to write one that was pretty successful, an image of George Oppen talking to me on the street one day which is also about my poetic. Then thelpoem I tried to write this week since I had nothing and we were having a Sappho meeting I. . .one of the things that flashed through my mind is how hard it is for me to be with people in social situations because I have nothing to say. Usually it’s easier for me to be with them if they talk a lot but every once in a while there is someone who talks a lot and you just realize that you can’t stand anything they are saying so I invented a whole situation about having a conversation with someone you hate and it still isn’t working one-hundred percent but I had the geat inspiration of mentioning Carmelites—the order of nuns that take a vow of silence—so now I have something to aim for, wishing that the whole world were Cannelites [laughter]. But to me it’s very new to begin writing these poems out of half. . .it would be more likely for me to invent a poem out of fantasy than take these half-baked situations that, as far as I’m concerned, have nothing to do with poetry. I’m not a satirical poet so why would I want to write a poem about how awful it is to be at a dinner table with a boring person sitting next to you talking? But I now find reasons to try and invent them into something different, or something that I haven’t tried before. These places of invention for Wakoski consistently recogrize visual images as points of departure. Whether it be physical images, visuals from memory, or situational emotive 121 memories, the constant is these images have to possess a type of resonance. These are moments of writing to learn; writing to learn why these images leave an imprint on her memory. 2. Play with Form From the outset of our conversation it was clear that Elizabeth Kerlikowske used play and experimentation with form as her primary invention strategy. Two days ago, I have this book of forms, and I try these new forms and the Welsh ones are always unpronounceable and they’re syllabic and they rhyme so I wrote a poem in this form and it was not my best poem but once I can wrap my head around the form it’s cool. So then today when I went to rewrite a different poem I rewrote it according to the way I thought it should sound but it was in the form of the Welsh poem, unintentional but I had absorbed it and there it was presented back to me without my even knowing it which I thought was really cool [laughter]. So something must have been happening. Subconsciously your mind must have been turning that form over until you had adapted it. Yes, but it was the form. . .let me explain it: it’s a quatrain and the first two lines are eight syllables and both end in the A rhyme. The third line is ten syllables but the B rhyme is on the eighth syllable and there’s a minor C rhyme at the end which is repeated in the second syllable of the fourth line which is only six 122 syllables long and then has the B line here. Once I got to the end of the bad poem I understood it pretty well and I could see how it was working and two days later to be able to just have it come out, I thought that was really cool. I thought that was a good example of what you might be talking about. As we spoke further, it was clear that more of her invention strategies, at first seemingly unrelated to form, were in fact outgowths of a concentrated look at, and play with, elements of form. What other strategies do you use? I’m so glad you asked that question because I was just writing a poem today and I knew I wanted to write something about Julie [fiiend who had recently died] but I think sometimes with grief if it’s too soon you end up with a piece of shit. But I was reading a thing by Joseph Campbell who said if you refer to anything as “thou” it gives it these qualities of reverence and awe. So I thought I would write about a day in April but I refer to that day as “thou.” I ended up writing really a poem about Julie disappearing on a day in April but used the word “thou.” And I thought well, I’ll just end up taking that out later but I left it, I really loved it because it sounded very biblical and yet vernacular and I was really happy with the marriage of that and not having a very sentimental thing but just using that weird pronoun really changed things. 123 This invention strategy of trying on a new word is very similar to the trying on of different forms. Rather than experimenting with rhyme scheme and structure, Kerlikowske is experimenting with a different pronoun, a pronoun that helps shape the rest of the poem while providing a certain type of tone and authorial positioning. ...right now I’m into air. I like to give my poems lots of air, so I’m trying to put lots of space on the page unless it’s in a form because then if it’s a sonnet it will look like a sonnet. I do like those big paragaphs of stuff on the page, I’m just not writing those now. That was good for a while but now I’m into air and space. That is still form on the page right? It is. It’s kind of its own form. I just like forms, even non-forms. Stuart Dybek also references form as an invention strategy. Rather than form, he calls it sequence and pattern. Like Kerlikowske, Dybek relies on form to help him organize on a large scale. In addition, Dybek uses form as a way to invent new pieces that he feels will help complete the sequence and pattern that he is working within. There’s been this kind of theme in my writing life over many years of writing these kinds of individual short pieces and then figuring out what the hell to do with them. I’m always more interested in sequence when I’m working with “fi'agments” than I am with the individual fragnents. But the individual fragment has to be written in order for me to be able to generate the sequence because what I’m looking for is individual pieces, as I’ve said earlier, a pattern. Once I see the 124 pattern, or once I make up the pattern, maybe it isn’t there but I’ve made it up— that pattern becomes generative of pieces I wouldn’t have written without it. It’s a kind of relationship. Rather than looking to dominate this piece with a previous agenda what I’m looking to do is have this relationship with stuff that’s already written that I’m going to surrender to, or that is going to prompt fi'om me something I wouldn’t ordinarily have written. I think that any poet who works with a book understands that process, any musician that works with an “album” understands that process, and finally any novelist does—that is, in the course of writing a novel, the novel itself is going to demand from you something you might not have thought of at the beginning of the process. Form continues to be a source of invention for Dybek as he juxtaposes various forms—now conceived as genres—in order to create new combinations. I’m always looking for counterpoints, juxtapositions, and genre is one of them. The other thing about genre is that it comes with a historical, allusive potential that one can engage. It offers that kind of point/counterpoint that becomes a formal element. As an example, when you stagger prose poems and short shorts with more conventional stories one of the things you’re working with is counterpointing the lyrical, which fi'equently is what prose poems and short shorts are about, with narrative. If you counterpointed as J erzy Kosinski does or as Italo Calvino does. In Invisible Cities, Calvino counterpoints dialogues between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo and in Steps J erzy Kosinski counterpoints dialogues between two unidentified 125 lovers with narrative pieces. You can say what they’re doing is they are counterpointing the dramatic mode with—in Invisible Cities—the lyrical mode because Calvino is working, in terms of his theme and variation of images about these cities. In the Kosinski book he’s working with contrasting the dramatic mode, these dialogues, with the narrative mode because the pieces in between are telling stories. It’s kind of my own deal to be talking about these modes. If you wanted to talk about genre you could say you are contrasting little dramatic pieces with narrative vignettes or lyrical vigrettes. In context of the book it’s the dynamic that you’re working with and usually when you’re messing around with genre that’s what you’re after, it’s the dynamic that exists between these various genres and often getting in the overlap between them which is a kind of no-man’s land, meaning that you’ve created an unpredictable area. One of the things that genre is, it’s frequently predictive. That is, if you know what a detective story is or you know what a science fiction story is, even to some degee a “literary story” although that’s less predictive, then you know what the predictions and expectations of the genre will be. But if you get into that lip between two different genres it becomes suddenly far less predictive. Diane Seuss makes the succinct and rather elegant argument that form is limitation and limitation forces people to be inventive. In fact, a lack of form, a lack of limitation, can be deadly to a writer: “That’s why in high school when their creative writing teacher comes and says, ‘I want you to go and write a poem about nature’——what’s that?” The prompt becomes open-ended to a fault. Seuss’ position is that “limitation is creative.” Here is an example of a prompt that, in her experience, would yield wonderful results 126 even from non-writers: Go outdoors and find a walnut and crack it open and look inside of it and taste it and then put yourself inside of there and write on the walls in side-lines.” This sort of prompt, which relies heavily on limitation which she pairs with form, becomes a scaffold for successful invention. 3. Entering the Linguistic Realm When asked to describe what a good day of writing looks like, Elizabeth Kerlikowske responded: “No one is home but me, that’s really key.” A fiiend of hers, Julie, had recently died and she explains why it’s important that no one is home. “I like to be alone because even in thinking about Julie I could tell my husband felt bad about it but didn’t want to deal with me feeling anything about it so you clear out that shit.” In this example the clearing out of the house helps to clear out the mind—specifically clearing the mind from dealing with other people’s thoughts which can potentially intrude upon her own. Diane Seuss takes the same stance. She needs to be alone because “I need complete focus. The distractions of other people really get to me.” For both Kerlikowske and Seuss, being alone helps them enter into what Bill Olsen refers to as “the linguistic reahn” of writing poetry. The statements already shared by Diane Wakoski allude to the physicalities associated with entering such a linguistic realm as well. Wakoski says, “I am somebody that likes a block of time.” She goes on to articulate where and when these blocks of time have existed for her—from the New York Public Library during lunch to the afternoons spent in her writing room with its window overlooking the street outside. 127 Bill Olsen also took me through his own version of a typical day of successful writing. I can’t first of all say that all days are successful. I would say on a typical day I get up and I read first—and I don’t read favorites—I read work that’s unknown to me. There are a couple advantages of that for me. In the morning my mind is a tabula rasa, it’s a blackboard without any words written on it, and for me to enter the linguistic realm, the creative realm of poetry, I have to hear the language, I have to find my way into that language and not only that, find my way into a language built around perceptual activity as opposed to informational activity like a newspaper or even strictly intellectual activity. I have to be in that zone for a while. I keep a journal by me while I’m reading and the instant something occurs to me I write it down and after I have a page or two of notes I get impatient. This creative impatience sends me to the computer and I try to bang away at something. For Olsen, entering the linguistic and creative realm through reading is a way for him to “get the unconscious kicked” in order to “generate stuff” and the way he does this is “to read first.” He continues: “That makes it possible for me to read with a little less ego involved, with less expectations, and less self-conscious. Maybe that makes the unconscious come to play more readily.” I wanted to learn more about these “page or two of notes” so I asked him if these were random, unrelated notes or notes that clustered themselves around a common theme. 128 He began by telling me that he uses as much of his notes as possible: “It’s a form of conservation,” he said, “In other words I don’t generate a lot. I use quite of bit of my notes.” He went on to characterize these notes: “They’re lines, they’re not prospectus notes towards a poem, although occasionally I will write down titles and things like that, these are lines of poetry and phrases. Although I used to, I no longer begin with subject matter.” Does the language then get you into the subject matter? Normally I would say that’s true. Most frequently I’m sitting reading a book writing down lines that occur to me and that sends me to the computer. A sort of critical mass? I guess. That’s a good way of thinking about it. When you sit down to read, do you do so with the intention of generating lines of poetry? Yes. 4. Preparing for accidents: Developing an attitude of receptivity Each of these poets consider the importance of accidents within their invention process. Diane Seuss posits that the role surprise and accident plays in her work is as much as “ninety-percent.” Stuart Dybek and Elizabeth Kerlikowske speak directly to the influence that accidents play while Bill Olsen and Diane Wakoski speak to the 129 applicability of accidents without naming it as such. Here is Dybek and Kerlikowske on accidents within their invention process: Dybek: If you regard writing as discovery what you try to do fiequently is place yourself in a situation where you don’t know where you are going and you’re looking for patterns, you’re feeling your way for patterns, you’re actually looking for accidents, you want accidents to happen. You can’t create the accident, but you’re hoping to create the condition that might create an accident. Kerlikowske: Yes, accidents take place everywhere and I think in a way that’s the difference between people who write and people who are really writers, is when the accident comes you’re there for it, you can accept it, you don’t censor it out as I think some writers do and you are able to capitalize on it. Kerlikowske views the preparation of writing as the preparation for accidents. In this manner, her invention process—the way that she approaches the blank page—has a geat deal to do with preparing for and recogrizing what she calls accidents. ...1 was thinking that the way I think about invention in poems or in writing poetry has to do with lots of preparation and accident. I think the more prep—by prep 1 mean reading all kinds of stuff and trying all different kinds of forms—then I’m ready, I’m prepared for whatever comes along. 130 It’s striking how similar Kerlikowske and Dybek view accidents. They both work to create the conditions for accidents and are thankful when they come. These authors both have an attitude of receptivity when it comes to accidents within their invention approaches. These accidents that Dybek and Kerlikowske refer to are at the same time stretching outward from and beyond their own understanding which is what they are after in their poetry and this ties directly into viewing poetry paradoxically as an act of both outward exploration and introspection. Diane Seuss positions herself to be receptive to accidents in her work by continually breaking habits and changing tactics which results in being surprised by what comes out of the writing process: So the reason you know if it ’s a good poem, and the reason you know you’re onto something, is that you feel more alive, you feel excited about it. And I’m like, “Holy shit! Where did that come from?” So there’s surprises. Yes! Bill Olsen speaks of accidents as well, preferring to use the term “natural error.” The poem should be read not as an unnatural rightness but as a natural error. That’s what makes it interesting. Humanity has to deal with, for my money, not a transcendence of faults but a construction of faults into something coherent or even beautiful. 131 Diane Wakoski deals with visual images that have resonance for whatever reason. She finds these images of resonance to be the appropriate places for poetry investigations. These resonant images are not accidental, per se, but they are lodged in her memory without clear reason. These images are akin to accidents in that they resonate without explanation. Furthermore Wakoski positions herself to be receptive to such images, and takes the stance that poems derived from such images possess meaning beyond authorial intention in the same manner that Dybek and Kerlikowske reference and become receptive to what they refer to as “accidents.” 5. “It ’s that Vision that Takes You A Writer’s Slant Diane Wakoski takes firll advantage of the word slant which she borrows from Emily Dickinson. Slant has a geat deal to do with control and, for Wakoski, control over her poetry—how much she chooses to share from her personal life and how she chooses to share it with the world—is a source of creative energy and focus. There’s Emily Dickinson’s great word, she does own this word, “slant,” and it seems like a word that is almost numinous for a poet, because it’s not the journalist’s slant on things. But it’s that vision that takes you. You’re looking at the same thing everyone else is looking at, and it’s not just point of view, it’s the slant of it, and you in fact then use the visual object, not like a Rorschach test, and 132 not exactly like a springboard to get you into the water, but you use it as, I don’t know, the beginning of a meander through a map or a landscape. The real challenge becomes, how can you invent the slant to solve a problem that everyone else thinks is either solved by material goods or good fortune or is not worthy of the subject of poetry. So you have to keep inventing and inventing in such a way that you convince your reader who may not have the same experiences that you do. For Wakoski, time can help her to come back to a poem with a different slant altogether which can then provide a blueprint for revision. This is much different than the way Bill Olsen, for example, views time as a hurdle to overcome if he is to re-enter the text with the same subjective state of mind he was able to begin with. So even this idea of the discard heap...so time is a type of invention heuristic right? So you are creating something and if you don’t like it right away you put it away to look at it later. What do you think happens in the interim, is there a subconscious process that is going on? In the interim, initially you are just refreshing your mind until you go back to it and you may bring to the poem things that have eroded or that you are just too tired to remember. In a longer period of time you may have developed a slightly different way—slant—of thinking about things and one of the things that can happen is that you can’t even think of why you would want to revise the poem so 133 then it’s really trash although most of us are so egotistical that that almost never happens. So then you think, well what can you do? Wakoski’s invention approach consistently deals with having a story to tell but not being able, or not wanting, to tell it in an obvious or objective manner. Many of Wakoski’s poems are about telling her stories, her particular slant on an object, experience, or emotion through poetry. This anecdotal reference to a fihn based on Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood is indicative of this approach that she adopts in her poetry. So now I can spin a poem out of them [resonant memories] and it has to in some way start connecting with that slant, something that is my craziness that makes me write poetry, and I think that slant, to get back to your subject, is where our invention comes from. It’s part psychological it might be in that sense part of our personal mythology, it’s part autobiography, landscape, history, and it’s part of what. .. I think one of the things that I’ve always wanted to do in my poems is present to the world—there’s your audience—what they can’t see when they look at me or just listen to me talk. And that’s the slant, and that turns into the personal mythology of Diane or whoever’s the writer of the poem, and I think that’s where, if you can visualize the form in a Platonic sense, visualize it, that’s your slant, no one else will have quite that same version of it, but they will understand it. 134 That’s particularly for me involved with narrative because as you know there are many ways to tell a story and you need to keep retelling the stories that pain you or trouble you, and sometimes even the ones that please you, you need to keep reinventing them so that they finally are the way you want the world to see you— there’s your audience again. You know I was really fascinated. . .I’ve never read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood I was never interested in it and I truthfully wasn’t even interested in the Philip Seymour Hoffman movie but I did get interested in seeing the other film—unfortunately they were made in the same year so no one pays attention to it—the one called Infamous, which is basically trying to do the same thing and it made me. . .I got more interested, not in Truman Capote, but Perry, the one of the two murders who really. . .it was really important for him to talk to Truman Capote because he wanted his story told in a way that people would say, “I see why he did that.” He knew he couldn’t change the story but by slanting the story you can make people understand it. Wakoski goes on to reference the story of Madea and Toni Morrison’s Beloved in which a mother kills her child so that it can escape slavery. “I think that’s one of the reasons that I picked the Medea story” she says. “I’ve never literally murdered anybody or anything but in my world the violence of giving up children for adoption, which I did, was the same as killing them even though what I thought I did was a good thing because they got better parents. I know now that I would have been a truly terrible parent. And I love the idea of a heroine who understands that life isn’t valuable at any price.” Wakoski’s approach toward slanting her poetry is influenced by this desire to tell her story in a way 135 that she can control, in a way that presents her own thinking and motivations, and in a manner that fiees her from social and political constraints as well. “I think it’s really important,” she continues, “to be able to tell our stories as non-righteous stories, as non- moral stories, as stories that appreciate every human act. ...” ...we want to be in control of our lives, but most of us can’t be very much in control of our lives, and so we choose something that gives us a sense that mitigates the lack of control we have, in my case a way to tell my story that at least presents my slant. 6. The Use of Models / Ideal Examples Diane Wakoski makes a distinction between poetics and aesthetics wherein poetics refers to form and aesthetics refers to artistic taste and some rather traditional notions of beauty. “You can share aesthetics but not share poetics” she says, “and you change your poem not for aesthetic reasons but for reasons of poetics which is form.” While this separation of poetics and aesthetics is particularly useful for contextualizing and considering critical feedback which Wakoski is referring to here, I will be employing a more conventional definition of poetics, one which encompasses aesthetics. For my purposes poetics will refer to the type of poetry that writers hold up as emulative examples for themselves. The ways in which these authors employ ideal examples tells us a geat deal about their inventional approaches. Diane Wakoski, for example, references a small number of elite poems which for her are ideal poems: 136 I do believe that there have been ideal poems that I have discovered along the way—not that I’ve written them—that other people have written and that I'm always trying to find a way to reinvent those poems as my own. I say I could never write Wallace Stevens’ “Snowman” or I could never write DH Lawrence's “Snake” or I could never write William Butler Yeats’ ballad about Wandering Aengus or “The Second Coming.” On and on is the list of things I couldn't write but in some way I'm always trying to reinvent perhaps one of those geat poems. Wakoski goes into further detail sharing the fact that she is not modeling after these poems and poets in a way that imitates, rather, in a way that reinvents. A good reinvention might not even be recognizable as a derivative of its original text. It's different from modeling. I hate to use the word like deconstructing, but it's taking the model apart and putting it together in a different way. Sometimes that just means plugging. . .your mythology into the poem instead of Wallace Stevens’ or Yeats’. But most people wouldn't recogrize the poems that you see as ’ reinventions of some geat poem as such; you might not even recogrize that. Diane Seuss talks about the use of models in a similar manner to Wakoski. Rather than modeling them in the strict sense of the word, she is unpacking the models to find what they are doing that she may be able to use in her own writing. 137 Gerald Stern has had a very big impact on me in the last couple of years. By emulating just the length of his poems. . .he’s gotten real short, like sonnet-ish, and real odd endings where suddenly it just stops and you’re like “nothing’s resolved, where did we get to?” And this kind of narrativity that’s not linear, and I think I’ve imitated him quite a bit as a way of integating some of that stuff into my own work because I think he was a geat antidote for my tendency toward over- narrativising. So when I read somebody who really rocks my boat I want to, not ape them, but integate the thing that I see there that I think, “Oh I need to try that.” It is clear that for both Wakoski and Seuss, this type of modeling is inventive—inventive in that no clear line can easily be traced between the original (the model) and their own reinvention spawned from the original. It is more akin the way Olsen reads writers to help springboard himself into a mode of invention for his own writing. Elizabeth Kerlikowske talks about the poet e.e. cummings as a role model for her writing and life. The way in which Kerlikowske models herself after cummings has a geat deal to do with his antithetical approach to rules and conventions. In the tenth gade I made this little office for myself and I loved e.e. cummings because he broke every rule that I had been taught and I thought this is what I want to do, I want to break all these rules. I want to be not like “them” [laughter] which is a very vague goal but I managed to live that. 138 I can remember Stuart Dybek telling me: “Hemingway is deadly.” This was the first time I realized how important, and how potent, a model could be for my own writing. Dybek was referring to the fact that reading too much Hemingway made you write like Hemingway. After reading a short-short of mine his critical feedback was that “this has been done before” and I knew he was referring to Hemingway’s minimalist style which becomes immediately apparent on the page. I was ripping off Hemingway but not ripping him off well enough so that it could be described, as Wakoski relates, as a reinvention of Hemingway. In my interview with Dybek he spoke about J erzy Kosinski and Italo Calvino—twoauthors that are working with counterpointing genre which is of particular interest to Dybek and therefore serve as successful models for his own writing. In Invisible Cities, Calvino counterpoints dialogues between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo and in Steps J erzy Kosinski counterpoints dialogues between two unidentified lovers with narrative pieces. You can say what they’re doing is they are counterpointing the dramatic mode with—in Invisible Cities—the lyrical mode because Calvino is working, in terms of his theme and variation of images about these cities. In the Kosinski book he’s working with contrasting the dramatic mode, these dialogues, with the narrative mode because the pieces in between are telling stories. Over the years I have never heard Dybek speak more highly of a writer than Eudora Welty. I’ve heard him say that eventually every writer needs to deal with his/her weaknesses except for Eudora Welty because she has none. 139 Then there are some writers who invent each sentence and other writers you just don’t feel that they have the technical chops to do that. I’ll give you an example. When I read Eudora Welty I feel she is inventing every sentence she writes. In reading Dybek’s work it is readily apparent why he is so tuned into feeling that “she is inventing every sentence as she writes”; his own writing is spontaneous and inventive which reflects his choice in poetics. 7. Giving Oneself Overt Assignments Prompting is another invention strategy that Elizabeth Kerlikowske employs. In our discussion about how she came up with the ideas behind a goup of published vigrettes she says, “I never would have written either one of those pieces without some sort of weird prompt from the universe.” She continues, “For me, prompt works.” Kerlikowske also shares the fact that when she provides a prompt for her students she writes along with them. This exercise of writing with her students in response to a given prompt oftentimes provides her with the time for writing, something she says is difficult to come by given her teaching demands at the community college. Bill Olsen talks about assigring himself proj ects which he sees as a necessary step toward learning the craft of poetry. This idea that the craft of poetry must be learned is consistent across all of the authors interviewed. 140 When I was younger in my writing I would take on projects. This week I’d say I’ll read Frost and Lowell and I’ll write seven sonnets: one a day. I would establish myself assigrments. Or I would say today I read Two Citizens by James Rice and try to write an apprentice poem. I was more given then to giving myself overt assignments. How did that change? I’ve read and written a lot. Poetry is an act of making as well as an act of seeing, in other words, it requires craft and one has to learn one’s craft. You don’t want to sit on a two-legged chair. I gave myself to learning that craft. And now I can rely more on intuition. Diane Seuss also gives herself overt assigrments as a way to push herself and avoid living fiom poem to poem. It seems overt assignments are a way to give her writing a sense of consistency as well. I make projects for myself all the time. To commit to more than one poem. I don’t live poem to poem, life is too complicated for that. I say “this summer I’m working on X” and even something as banal as I’m going to write poems that are twelve lines or less all summer because I’ve been writing long, rich, clunky things—I’m sick of it. What happens if 1 limit myself? 8. Reasons for Writing: “It ’s an endlessly fascinating, happy struggle” 141 To paraphrase my thinking, the connection between a writer’s reasons for writing and invention is that one’s reasons for writing serve as the impetus behind facing the blank page again and again. Without strong reasons for writing—what writing gives back to the writer—there is no reason to begin writing, no reason to continue writing, no reason to continually invent. In describing how these writers describe what it is that writing gives back, what their reasons are for writing, I am presenting the argument that why these authors write is directly connected to how they invent through writing. Diane Wakoski, for example, emphasizes the control that writing gives her—a control that she does not feel in any other aspect of her life. This feeling of control is the reason why she continually revisits the blank page, the reason why she continually invents through writing: One of the things I’ve talked about earlier is that writing a poem that you feel is successful makes you feel in control of either the idea that you are talking about or the experience that you are relating or the emotions that you are feeling and that’s a very rewarding human experience to feel in control of something. I sometimes feel like the only—certainly when I was young—I felt like the only thing that made me feel in control of my life was a poem. So it had a huge, huge feedback for me. Now, living the bourgeois life, having enough money in my retirement fund, not having to be in a place where there is no medical healthcare, not yet being so overweight that I can’t continue to enjoy all the wonderful food that’s available, having a nice loving husband, not yet having to suffer from somebody’s death or my own long ill-health or something like that, you know 142 there are lots more things that I think I have control over. But when I think about it I know I don’t have control over those things. Robert could be gone tomorrow, my health could be gone tomorrow, my money could be gone tomorrow. All kinds of things could be gone so the control that I feel in my poems. . .how can that be gone? That can never be gone. Bill Olsen talks about poetry helping him with his life which means dealing honestly with human realities. This view helps him to invent poetry that is meaningful since he is using poetry as a means to understand his experienced reality. The making of poetry also takes on a therapeutic dimension for Olsen. I want poetry to help me, as Stevens said, to help me with my life. Even if it’s poetry of humor I want it to take itself seriously because it helps me with my life and the only way for that to happen in humor, poetry, or art—and it doesn’t matter if it’s abstract, nonrepresentational, nonlinear or any of that stuff—is for it to contend with human realities. [Poetry is] Therapeutic not in the sense of confessional or talking to a therapist but I mean it pretty strictly in the sense of making, the release involved in making which is constructing or creating something that’s informed by the self but has a life outside of the self. Maybe that’s the whole appeal right there. I just keep coming back because its an endlessly fascinating, happy struggle. 143 Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s approach toward writing poetry continues to evolve out of her position that poetry is an act of exploration. Her stance of writing poetry “to achieve whatever end I can achieve” reflects this exploratory view as opposed to working on a body of work that would “look like one person’s consistent mind.” I think one of the things that other people would say about my poems is that you never know what you’re going to get. So there’s an element of surprise. So if you had an anthology it just wouldn ’t look like the traditional anthology? I wouldn’t look like one person’s consistent mind. It would look like one person’s scattered mind. Trying on all these different hats. Yes, to achieve whatever end I can achieve. Diane Seuss calls poetry “prayer for the blasphemous” and her reasons for returning to the page time and again take on this type of deep spiritual connection between her life and the written word—in fact, writing is the way that she connects with and understands the world: “It puts things into some sort of order. It responds to what happened.” She also speaks to writing’s consistency—“I think of the shit I’ve written my way through”—which mirrors Wakoski’s notion of control and the fact that one can never lose poetry. “Existentially” Seuss says, “it’s a geat fighting back against pain, chaos, whatever. And it’s beautiful besides.” 144 Well I’d probably be curtains if I didn’t have writing because it’s been the most consistent thing in my life, it’s sort of like Scarlet O’Hara: “We’ll always have...” “Tomorrow ’s another day. ” “Tomorrow’s another day, we’ll always be writers.” It’s the geat leveler in a lot of ways. I get divorced, my kid’s an addict, whatever. I’m a writer and it’s howl see. I always can respond to whatever it is. You know, Clifton has that line, “Every day something has tried to kill me and has failed.” I think poems push back against that bulldozer. Con’s wife died recently and we were sitting together over lunch and I sort of said, “But poems are cool” and he’s like “Yep.” It’s an intrinsic satisfaction for Seuss. For example, she doesn’t rely on publication to fuel her desire to write. I’m not a big self-promoter. I send things out, but not relentlessly. Partly because it helps me keep my job because we’re supposed to publish but, you know, it’s cool, kind of like winning a five-dollar lottery ticket. It’s cool if somebody writes me and says, “I read your stuff on Blackbird or in Georgia Review. There is something to the endpoint that the poem got to. That somebody can read it and go, “Man.” That’s cool but that may be the least interesting thing about it. Seuss is also interested in the way that poetry allows her to commune with the dead and she speaks to energy and ability of poetry by calling it “fierce.” 145 ...there’s a feeling of companionship with the dead, I mean that’s the other part I haven’t said but my dad died when I was seven, lost a lot of people. Poetry doesn’t acknowledge the boundary between the living and the dead, it communicates daily with the dead and so it’s a way of keeping that dialogue open and of always talking back to experience. Keats, on his death bed, is still saying “You’re going to want to give me your blood because of the seduction of my work. Here, I’m holding my hand out to you, future reader, whoever the hell you are.” Whitman the same except he’s friendlier and in my way the same. You know, it’s fierce. Both Elizabeth Kerlikowske and Bill Olsen continue to speak in terms that extend the act of writing poetry away from themselves: “To achieve whatever end I can achieve”; “You never know what you’re going to get”; “. . .creating something that’s informed by the self but has a life outside of the self.” Diane Wakoski and Diane Seuss reference the satisfaction of control and naming experience as reasons for writing, especially given the fact that there is little we have control over in our lives. Seuss also speaks to the fierceness of poetry and its ability to transcend boundaries such as that between the living and the dead. What’s common across all these authors is that their writing gives them something back which fuels their own need to revisit the blank page as well as the page in need of revision. I’m hoping that two aspects of invention are clear within this section: (1) invention is fueled by specific reasons for writing and (2) invention is shaped by the reasons behind writing. 146 9. There’s no arrival: Breaking habit as a source of continual invention When you rob yourself of some habit. . .in the advanced poetry that I teach a lot of what I do is rob them of the habitual. So whatever you tended to do, stop doing it. It’s terrifying! Think about if you had to stop being habitual in your life. Habit is everything. It’s how we get through a day. Maybe a good day of writing is when I stop being habitual. And it’s like you experience everything for the first time. For Diane Seuss, breaking habit is a primary invention strategy which leads to the development of new, unfamiliar work. She is continually challenging herself to open new doors which will expand her repertoire and help her to experience writing in new and exciting ways. For Seuss, habit can become a crutch that stifles one’s inventiveness; a reliance on habit can turn a writer into a “repeat, a robot.” One of the ways that she breaks habit is to recogrize different strategies being employed by other authors: “I break a line here because that’s where I break lines. My poems are this wide.” Well what if my poems get this wide? What if I turn the page like this? That’s what D.A. Powell did. A geat writer, “Cocktails” his geat book. He took the page and turned it on the side and started writing in heroic couplets, wide Whitman-like lines. It changed everything. 147 Another way that Seuss breaks habit is to continually push back notions of arrival, success, rest, and contentment. It’s whatever rattles your chain. And the thing is you have to keep doing it. There’s no resting place. There’s no: “Ok, I’ve arrived.” You know with musicians, think about musicians, when they get somewhere and say, “That’s how I sound.” It gets hideous. “I’m Springsteen. I write for the working class.” Even though you’re a fucking billionaire? So there’s no place to stop. So you ’re constantly... it ’s paradoxical right? You’re trying to reach the horizon but you know you’ll never get there and it’s in the search, it’s in the process. And you get there and maybe you spend a day and then there’s the next one. Yes, you just can’t rest on your laurels or it gets stale. In order to avoid staleness, and to keep her writing inventive and fresh, she must continually push herself away from the familiar and comfortable, even if this means shunning the very work that may have garnished the most praise. You’re constantly unseeding your little source of popularity. I had people back when I was an undergad saying, “Why did you stop writing Monster Woman? She was cool.” Yeah, but after a couple Monster Woman poems it’s been there, done that. Then you’re just self-imitating. That’s what I meant by fi'ustrating. If you’re really true to it, it’s never a place where you can say. . .it’s sort of like 148 housework, you can never arrive. It’s clean for a day and it looks pretty and then it’s messy again. You want to keep it messy. When I asked Seuss what she though invention meant, she responded with this notion of breaking habit: “it means writing with your nose to the pavement, with your nose to the path and without preconceptions and so every time it’s a new discovery, it’s a new layer rather than ‘this is what I do so that’s what I’ll do today; I write about my father so I’ll write another thing about my father.’ It’s a reinvention every time which is a really rough way to go.” She continues: “For me, that’s always been the most important part of writing, feeling as though I am walking into new territory.” In order to walk into new territory, in order to experience everything new, Seuss has to first identify habits and then break them by approaching her writing in a novel manner. She does this by employing a new strategy she sees in another writer and by discerning habitual behavior in her writing and. then “unseeding” herself. 10. Channeling Elizabeth Kerlikowske relates an invention strategy which she names “channeling.” The experience of channeling is similar to taking dictation from an unknown source as the text surprises the writer even though it is being written by his/her hand. I had an experience once where I was up in the mountains of Colorado. I woke up and I could almost literally hear this voice telling me this story and it was in black 149 dialogue. I wrote it all down and it was published in this philosophy journal. It was like taking dictations. I’ve almost never had that again but I accepted it when it came. I didn’t say, “Well that’s really weird.” I just said, “Well let me get a 9’ pen. Instead of questioning where characters, ideas, dialects, etc., are coming from Kerlikowske takes a stance toward production, toward writing to discover. It is a stance characterized by forwarding the writing before the content is fully understood and digested. Kerlikowske shares one more experience—the only other time she has experienced the process of writing in this manner. I did have that experience once before. It was really early. I was out at Amherst and was sitting in this bedroom. My daughter and I had gone out to visit this arboretum and there was a huge tree there. I got back to my room and I started to write this story about a girl who was coming fiom Europe and leaving her family behind and I had no idea what the hell it was. At the end I’m writing and I’m sobbing and it was really intense. I felt really charmeled that time. So you felt while you were writing you were discovering what was happening. I was. I had no idea what was going on. I was talking in broken English, it was weird but very cool. Channeling is an act of invention—invention framed as beginning with the blank page—in that channeling is a way of beginning the writing process in terms of both 150 language and ideas. When channeling is paired with taking dictation from an unknown source, the language precedes content as the author is discovering the text as he/she writes the text. This view of invention takes the form of inspiration and sudden insight— a view that is common across disciplinary boundaries as well as lay experience—and is preceded by receptivity: the author must position themselves as being receptive to the experience of channeling. As will be discussed in chapter 5, channeling is also a reflection of the work an author has done. This is to view the experience of channeling, the experience of taking dictation, as a result of sublirnating craft and the fermentation of ideas over time. Re-entering the Text, or Revision as Invention The symbiotic relationship between revision and invention emerges from these interviews. The categories developed within this section are similar in that they view revision as an extension of invention. 1. Places for Invention Within the Text Each of these authors speak to the practice of carving out spaces within spaces to reinvent. These are spaces that offer moments for invention within an already formulated text. Bill Olsen offers an example: 151 Absolutely, and in my case, since I am an incessant reviser I consider the line between the first draft and revision to be less and less discemable. I like going back to those spaces because they are spaces. A verbal construct creates something special. It’s a place to inhabit and it’s a safe place no matter what you’re writing about—it could be the Roman Coliseum—and I value that so much that I have to ultimately disconnect fi'om the safety of the place and let the poem go. The “verbal construct” that Olsen speaks to here is what I am referring to as a space within a space; it is a space within the larger text that Olsen can inhabit and invent within. Elizabeth Kerlikowske makes this similar move by transferring between forms: “I wrote a short story and it sucked so I shrunk it down to a pantoom and it sucked even more.” And the process continues: “. . .so I finally got it down to a sonnet but it was a sonnet that was fragments of the pantoom. . ..” Invention is taking place throughout this process and is certainly not limited to the moment she puts pen to blank paper. By transferring her ideas through different forms she is inventing anew with each successive form. I asked Diane Wakoski this very direct question: “So revision is wedded very closely to invention then?” to which she responded “Yes” before expounding further: “It means you have to discover something that was missing or that was buried and reformat it, to use a technological term, or reforrnulate it or create a new form. . . .” These places within the text which offer moments of invention for Wakoski are places where the author has to either find something that’s missing or create a new form. Creating a new form is what 152 Kerlikowske’s example illustrates and finding something that’s missing is what Stuart Dybek is consistently referencing as his primary inventive move. Dybek is looking at the work he’s already written as a means to “prompt fiom me something I wouldn’t ordinarily have written.” In fact, Dybek’s primary invention strategy is to fool himself into thinking that he is reacting rather than inventing from scratch—a further illustration of a writer creating a construct to aid invention within an already formulated text. I’ll do most anything to escape from first draft so sometimes what I’m looking for is something that I’ve sketched out or wrote some version of sometime previously that I can then use as a basis, a springboard. In that way, illusion or not, it doesn’t seem exactly like I’m generating first draft material but that I’m reacting to something else. Sometimes that’s illusory but it’s an illusion that helps. So you feel as though responding is where you feel comfortable and so it’s easier to do that than starting from scratch? Yes, I hate starting from scratch. Sometimes I’m looking for a kind of a little help from my former self. In the writing classes I had with Dybek he would consistently turn the phrase “a place for invention” which referred to a place within the writing that offered the writer a place to be inventive. This “place for invention” is the same place offered by Olsen’s “verbal construct.” Diane Seuss speaks to the revision process as a place of invention, a place to Challenge oneself to start anew. 153 My revision theory is the opposite of tidying, it’s funny, I can’t remember what I’ve called it in a workshop I’ve taught, but basically, fucking it up. I think a poem is much more interesting if you think of revision as fucking it up, as disemboweling it rather than making it neater. What then? Do you have a neater turd? I don’t know. I think revision ought to be about evisceration. Seuss also talks about revision as “It’s sometimes writing the poem’s shadow.” The initial, or current, draft has gotten her to a point but she continues to push herself past that point to discover what else is there, lurking beyond the surface of her draft. You know somebody said of Emily Dickinson, her first line is everybody else’s last line. And I think one of the most lethal things is to feel like poems need to wrap up or resolve. So to rip the resolution off the end of the poem and to figure out now what, if I don’t resolve, if I don’t neaten it up and tie it off with a bow, instead pull the rug out from under myself, then where do I go? 2. The Text Informs Itself Bill Olsen talks to his practice of “listening the poem forward.” This is a practice in which the text informs itself. Trying to listen the poem forward is actually a useful device in revision. 154 Listen the poem forward? Yes, you might have a word appear in a poem, let’s say ‘mock,’ and it’s just a placeholder and you think: ‘I put that word there because the sound of the word is right but I hadn’t found the right word so then you play around. . .ok what word sounds like mock? Maybe it’s clock? Maybe it’s block?’ You have heard the poem forward to begin with and this is a continuing of trying to hear the poem forward. Trying to listen. In speaking of time as a heuristic toward revision and invention (revision as the invention of new ways of seeing a poem and new ways of developing a poem), Bill Olsen takes quite the Opposite approach that I had rather naively assruned was the default for all writers. Rather than viewing time as a heuristic for developing critical perspective, Olsen sees time as an obstacle needing to be overcome if one is going to become subjectively re-engaged in the material of the poem. This relates to listening the poem forward because Olsen, in his move toward viewing revision as an exercise in subjectivity, has to re-enter the place where he initially was able to hear the poem to begin with if he is going to successfully continue listening the poem forward. What do you think time does? If you are working on a poem one day and then you come back to it a week later does that give you an entirely new way of seeing the poem? Well of course you’re a different person in one or two weeks and you’re living in a different set of emotions. Then it becomes finding your way back to that 155 emotional landscape which isn’t always possible even on a good day. And the perspective it adds I think we customarily regard as critical perspective, right? That we can be, a week or two later, more objective about our work. I don’t see revising as an exercise in objectivity. I see it as more subjectivity. I see it as a continuation of chance-taking. You might make the wrong move. It’s amazing when you think of the near infinite number of moves one can make in a reasonably long poem and how many good poems there are even so. It attests to the power of something. Stuart Dybek talks about surrendering to the writing which is a move that approaches writing in a similar manner to Olsen’s listening the poem forward. Listening and surrendering are moves that allow the writing to inform itself. They each necessitate theoretical positioning of receptivity on the part of the author rather than overt and active understanding with an eye toward explanation. Here is Dybek on surrendering: It’s a kind of relationship. Rather than looking to dominate this piece with a previous agenda what I’m looking to do is have this relationship with stuff that’s already written that I’m going to surrender to, or that is going to prompt from me something I wouldn’t ordinarily have written. I think that any poet who works with a book understands that process, any musician that works with an “album” understands that process, and finally any novelist does—that is, in the course of writing a novel, the novel itself is going to demand fiom you something you 156 might not have thought of at the beginning of the process. I’m not claiming any particular uniqueness for it. That ties into a lot of things that I’ve heard. Olsen talks about “listening the poem forward, ” that the poetic form takes over and starts to dictate what comes next. That’s it exactly. I just heard a quote the other day actually, I think it was Robert Frost, who said that if there are 29 poems in a book the 30’” is the book itself so that kind of relationship between the pieces is what you ’re after right? Well that’s excellent. For Dybek, surrending has to do with letting the text inform him of what’s missing, what he needs to write in order to complete the pattern. This process becomes a process of invention because what is written holds the clues to show him what still needs to be written. It varies so much that it’s hard to generalize about. It depends on what I’m working on. For instance, right now I’m trying to put together a book that would be made up of pieces that I have already published in magazines over the last 15 years, or even 20, pieces that didn’t belong in my other books. So the process in this particular instance is to try to discern a pattern in those pieces so that I can shape some form out of them so that they would suggest other pieces that I may write to fill that form out. But that’s a very different process than if I were just writing from scratch or mining notebooks as I do sometimes for ideas or going 157 back to boxes of earlier drafts for pieces that I’m ready to take another shot at. In each case it’s a different process. The one generalization that I would make is that frequently by this point in my life I’m relying on some degee on writing that I did earlier. It’s like there almost a collaboration between present and past. Once I see the pattern, or once I make up the pattern, maybe it isn’t there but I’ve made it up—that pattern becomes generative of pieces I wouldn’t have written without it. It’s a kind of relationship. Rather than looking to dominate this piece with a previous agenda what I’m looking to do is have this relationship with stuff that’s already written that I’m going to surrender to, or that is going to prompt from me something I wouldn’t ordinarily have written. Diane Seuss attends to letting the poem lead: “. . .when I teach writing I say ‘If you already know where you are going to end up, go have a picnic.’ I think then just go enjoy the day. But if the poem leads you, if you are willing to be led, then it will lead you somewhere else. Seuss continues and talks more explicitly to letting the poem lead: You can think of it a couple ways. Toni Morrison talks about listening the ancestors. Lucille Clifton, listening to the voices. For me it feels like maybe collective unconscious, tapping into a place, you know that pool, that we can all tap into if we can get down there. And I think it’s a matter of a certain type of discipline like meditation but you go into it through writing. 158 Another theme almost developed into its own category outright is “The Writing is Smarter than the Writer.” In the end, I felt this category was still an aspect of allong the text topinfonn itself because it involves continual deference to the writing, a continual downplay of authorial ego so that the poem takes center stage. Seuss represents this move as akin to riding a wave: Let me think about that. It’s a place where I know more than I know. I don’t think I’m that bright, but I think the imagination is really bright. And I don’t claim it as mine. I claim it as something that if I’m lucky I can ride the wave, but it’s not my wave, it’s bigger than me. The importance of being ego-less is not understated by Seuss. In fact, this speaks to why the author is not a source for understanding the poem—an idea that Wakoski underlines. The notion that understanding leads to reductionism and closes a poem down as opposed to opening a poem up is discussed by both Seuss and Olsen: Seuss: . . .When [Conrad] Hillberry comes to my classes and the students say “why this, why that” he usually says “that’s yours to figure out, I haven’t a clue.” And I think that’s a really good answer. I usually have a theory of why something is there or why I’m really obsessed with something or interested in something but in a lot of ways the writer is the last to know. If you know too much about every working part then there’s probably a problem. 159 Olsen: I think that in revising in a certain sense you want not to apprehend where you are going and not to understand the poem for as long as possible because the instant you understand it you reduce the poem to the lowest level of your understanding. In fact, I don’t think a poem is done until its ending in a way defies—even if it encourages—paraphrase. Let me say that differently. If the end of the poem I write exceeds my understanding I know maybe it’s worth staying with. Ultimately the end product has to outstrip an individual understanding, an individual consciousness. 3. Using Trusted Readers and Writing Groups As Wakoski developed her writing process over the years, she came to view writing goups in a much different light fiom her earlier career in which she dismissed the benefits of such writing groups, and the sharing of writing, altogether. She says, “I used to discount people who had writing goups because most of my life I not only had no writing goups but I had no one person who read my poems or responded to them.” Well, this isn’t an answer that I would have given you in the past, this is where I think it really helps to have a writing goup, a workshop or a regular reader, because I think you’ll get to the end of what you think the poem is and whether you are satisfied or not satisfied you won’t keep doing anything because you feel like you’ve done it. If you don’t have anyone to be an audience, more than an audience, a critical audience then you can put it away for a month, for six months, 160 a year and come back to it. Sometimes you have a fresh take on it but the chances are you won’t. I think the hard thing is finding a good critical audience. I feel I’ve created my own little monsters here: the Saphos and Alchemists and for awhile the Bourbon poets because I’ve taught them how to read poetry the way I want poetry to be read. I present my new poems to them and they still walk—not quite on eggshells—but they still do tO an extent. If I force them to they will tell me what really works and what really doesn’t work. Or if they just think the poem is perfect so they don’t want to talk about it anymore, or it’s wonderful or whatever. I quarrel with them, and that’s good, I will not quarrel with myself. Wakoski is very deliberate about the construction of her writing goups. In fact, she is the originator and keystone of each writing goup that she shares her poems with and her reasoning is that writers, in order to be effective critics of each other’s work, must share the same critical values: “Now I have two goups of readers who read the way I’ve taught them to read so they can be the brain, the part of my brain that I trust that is outside of my actual brain. I might not trust them if I didn’t think they shared my critical values.” Elizabeth Kerlikowske relies on a trusted reader to help foster her revision approach. What’s more, this trusted reader—her husband—serves as a way for Kerlikowske to hear the poem. Hearing the poem read aloud is a way for her to test her writing. I think people really i grore ear also. I think how a poem sounds is very important. And reading it out loud, that’s how I test my poems. 161 Test them by reading them out loud? No, I give my husband a big glass of whiskey and then he reads it out loud without ever having seen it before so I can just hear it and if he stumbles or if they are parts that just sound like shit then I know. I really need to hear it read cold by somebody because that helps me to know how it’s going to sound. That’s a great way to do it. It works well. The other night, the poem I was trying to cut down fi'om the pantoom form, and every time he got to a point in the poem where is read “the daughter” and it was very narrative he just read it, “the daughter!” and I just couldn’t wait for him to be done so that I could gab it and just start cutting shit out of it [laughter]. Diane Seuss discusses trusted readers as being able to revolutionize her poetry by pushing her to see past the current incarnation of what she has written and by identify habits in her writing that she has come to rely, habits that she was not able to recognize on her own. [Conrad Hillberry] will say in class “I get it written, I get it set, and then I’m like, Ok I’m done.” Then I come along and say, “Wait a rrrinute, what now?” And I think we have to do that for ourselves too. I mean he does that for me. I think that’s what a good editor can do for us and if we’ve got the guts we do it for ourselves. We can look at the end and we know; you know when you’re opting out or when you’re doing the cute thing. I have a fiiend, Horach Alilai, and he 162 said “Too many of your poems end like they’re sonnets, like there’s this couplet, bling! Quit doing that and see what happens.” And it really revolutionized my work because I quit going for the flourish, quit saving up for the flourish. 4. Discerning When It ’s a (Real) Poem Discernment refers to identifying whether or not a poem is working as a poem. One of the best illustrations of discernment comes fi'om an anecdote shared by Elizabeth Kerlikowske: “I remember when Herb Scott did that for me. He said, ‘This is the first real poem that you’ve written’ and I celebrated because I had written zillions of poems before that but I saw how that poem was different and it made that leap to something beyond what is was.” This practice of discerning a “real poem” was instructional for Kerlikowske because she could finally make this move of discernment on her own. Kerlikowske references two other moments when she uses discernment as a strategy in her writing. First, her use of a trusted reader allows her to hear when a poem is breaking down (i.e., when a poem ceases to be a poem). Second, Kerlikowske says: “I’m a person who believes you should write way more than you need then you can cut and still have something left.” Also, she says: “I can write a whole bunch of shit and when I finally hit the perfect line I know it.” These are both instances of discemment—discerning the parts of her writing that are made of the stuff that she considers “real” poetry. I asked Diane Seuss this question: When do you know when you’ve gotten it right? Her response: “The top of your head comes off right? It just feels true. And then you go back and you go, ‘Oh, that’s where I started being good old me rather than attending to 163 the wisdom of the poem. Let me shift that.”’ There are several different aspects of discernment happening at once here. First, she discerns when a poem is a real poem by feeling as though her emotional energy and emotional response is in the right place. But secondarily, she goes back to the poem to pose this question: “Does all of this live up to the integity of the feeling?” For Seuss, discernment happens at both levels in a different manner. On one level, she is discerning the stuff of poetry through raw emotional impact. On another level, she is discerning the stuff of poetry by attending to issues of craft—in this case whether or not a poem rises above cliché or personal habit. Bill Olsen also utilizes a strategy of discernment by looking for places where his writing is failing. What do you do when you revise? 1 know this is a huge question. Good question. I look for incompetence for one thing. And places where I wasn’t making connections, I was going on rhetoric, but I wasn’t really making perceptual connections, they weren’t there. There are times when I think the poems are unfinished because they are sentimental, they go for easy closure or they, as Stevens put it, ‘they fail for feeling.’ I hear them out loud and all that technical stuff matters of course. This strategy of discernment leads toward invention as Olsen positions himself to re- invent based on the incompetence and dissatisfactions that he identifies through a practice of looking and listening, in his writing. 164 This is a lyrical approach as opposed to a content approach, or are you trying to wed the two together, trying to find a word that fits the lyric and the meaning? If it doesn’t sound good it probably has no meaning and if it has no meaning it probably doesn’t sound good. Yes, bringing the two worlds together but in the experience of revision it doesn’t feel so directional. Sometimes revising is geat and sometimes it’s not. One must learn to make one’s dissatisfactions creative dissatisfactions. The dissatisfaction that anyone who writes poetry feels on a given day looking at one’s poems thinking, ‘These are lousy,” (and this experience happens, say, right before you give a reading) that dissatisfaction is actually a source of creativity. It brings you back to the work, it brings the work into focus if you can channel it right and you don’t direct it toward self-loathing. You direct it out toward the act of making which is healthy. That is the therapy behind writing poetry, the making of it. There is a correlation evident between audience and discernment. For example, Olsen talks about how the perspective gained right before a reading facilitates his ability to identify dissatisfactions within his work; Kerlikowske uses a trusted reader to “test” her poems (i.e., discernment); and Diane Wakoski also uses audience in the form of writing groups which help her to become less “satisfied” with her writing which helps push her back into the poem to re-invent and revise. 5. The Text as "Other, " and the Writer’s Relationship to it 165 Wakoski, Olsen, and Kerlikowske all make metaphorical references to poetry that portray the types of relationships they have developed to their poetry. For Wakoski poems are her children; for Olsen the process of making a poem is more akin to being a midwife; and Kerlikowske speaks of the writing process as organic. Wakoski: Poems are not messages, poems are intrinsic beings, and for some reason you're in love with making them. It’s a clichéd metaphor but things that writers write are their children. People often ask me what my favorite poem is. I tell them what my ten best are but like a parent I don’t have a favorite child. I know Diane Wakoski talks about her poems as her children. Do have a conception as to what those poems are like for you? Olsen: I’ve heard Louise Gliick say that the writer is more analogous to a midwife than a mother. That notion means, in a sense, and it appeals to me, because it seems truer of the way I write in terms Of figuring out how to get out of the way of the poem and that isn’t exactly birthing. Kerlikowske: Sometimes when I finish a poem, when it’s really finished, I accept it. It’s like a puzzle piece that fits up into the sky and it fits perfectly when it’s done. How do you know when you ’ve got that finished? 166 Well, you just know. I really think it’s organic. Someone sent me the proofs to this new poem that’s going to appear and I told them you just have to take out these two lines because when I read them I feel physically sick, it’s like a cloud that passes over when I go through that part of the poem and those can’t be in there. It’s really an organic feeling for me after the process of editing. Regardless of how similar or dissimilar these relationships across these poets happen to be, it is clear that conceiving of oneself as maintaining a relationship to the text is an aid to the process of invention. It is easy to see, for example, how invested one would have to be in the writing process to go to such lengths as to view the product of that process as one’s own children. It is also apparent how viewing the product of one’s writing as intrinsic beings that take on lives of their own is yet another way that these poets extend the writing of poetry outward from their own limited experiences and abilities. 6. From a Consciously Developed Craft to Instinct and Intuition When I was a child I never understood why my father would drive at night with the lights off inside the car. It seemed to me that with the lights on he would better be able to see what he was doing in terms of pressing the gas peddle and shifting gears. I remember also learning how to type. Our teacher would force us to look at the screen rather than our fingers which was fi'ustrating because I hadn’t yet intuited the positions of the keys. Even now, if I think about where each key on the keyboard is located before 167 pressing it down, my typing slows to a crawl. This section posits: one has to learn craft in order to forget it. What is the connection between sublimating crafi and invention? As will be further discussed in chapter 5, the sublimation of craft impacts what James Britton calls “shaping at the point of utterance.” When a neophyte writer puts pen to the page or fingertip to the keyboard they are simply not bringing with them a deep understanding or sublimation of crafi in the same manner as these interviewed writers. The way that these authors discuss the learning and enacting of craft has both implicit and tacit implications for the ways they invent through writing. They are shaping at the point of utterance in a manner that reflects years—a lifetime—of learning craft and inventing through language. The generalization that I’m drawing from these interviews with regard to invention is that one learns craft in order to forget it, one learns craft in order to sublimate it and be able to write instinctually. The underlying argument is that craft, when successfully transferred from overt understanding to intuition, aids and enables the invention process. Olsen: I’ve read and written a lot. Poetry is an act of making as well as an act of seeing, in other words, it requires craft and one has to learn one’s craft. You don’t want to sit on a two-legged chair. I gave myself to learning that crafi. And now I can rely more on intuition. Seuss: I’ve been writing long enough, everything is internal and instinctive. There’s that great groove where, as I’ve said, both of those parts [raw energy and craft] are working together at the same time. . .. 168 Diane Seuss is the most explicit about the connection between craft and raw energy which she sees as, at its best, working in tandem. When craft and raw energy are working together—a move she recognizes as operating internally and instinctively—she can literally feel the writing process working. Usually my poems come. . .I’ll have a first line and that’s all I’ll have when I sit down and then I really do surrender to the poem at that point. It’s weird because it sounds very mystical and partly it is, but partly it’s really logical too. I think that’s what’s cool about it, two parts of the brain working in tandem. Because there’s a lot of distraction going on. The formal stuff—what I’m thinking about line, what I’m thinking about music—that’s nice and distracting and that allows the other stuff to kind of rise. I think it’s a dual process, it’s two tracks at once, and that is it’s both mystical and really analytical and that’s why the attention is so keen, that’s why it’s such a nice feeling, because everything is working together when you’re cooking. Seuss recognizes the fact that an over-reliance on crafi can be limiting while an over- reliance on raw energy can also be problematic. She is clear about how these two elements have to work together in order to reach that “groove” in her writing. The anecdote that follows shows how her mentor, Conrad Hillberry, was craft-oriented and how she was more focused on the raw energy of writing. By influencing one another they were able to improve their poetry. 169 Well I think that’s one way to get there. I think if you are over-focused on that then you can become a slave to that. Con Hillberry is my mentor and we talk a lot about that. When he first started writing he was very much a Richard Wilbur follower, Philip Larkin, blank verse, and he was really good at writing a natural line that was still blank verse and writing in form. And then I was this kid who never had any real schooling in writing and I would write. . .I didn’t know you were supposed to have a left margin, so my stuff would be all over the place and his stuff was completely orderly and we met, I was sixteen and he was older, forty, and started influencing each other. Really we were representative of those two sides coming together. Apollonian and Dionysian. Exactly. His most recent book, really his last three books, you can just see him fanning out, literally he has poems where he’s lost. There’s one called “Path to the Cabin” where he’s just absolutely lost and by the end, the last line is “I’m down on all fours without a notion of where to go.” And I have kind of allowed myself to be brought into the corral a little more. He would probably say that craft obsession alone isn’t going to get you there. But having the distraction of craft and the intention of allowing yourself to be afraid might be the best combo. Elizabeth Kerlikowske speaks to the process of sublimating craft as well. She relates an anecdote in which she writes a really bad poem in response to her first efforts to understand a particular form (her primary invention strategy). Two days later she wrote 170 a poem without thinking consciously of the form and the poem came out naturally in that form which illustrated her implicit internalization of the form. Stuart Dybek says: “I think craft stimulates the imagination and sometimes becomes inseparable from it.” This reifies the notion that craft and imagination need to work in tandem. However, they need to work in tandem the way that dancers dance—the steps practiced to the point of becoming instinctive. This intuitive, instinctual approach to writing is what creates the space for the surprises and accidents that these authors speak of. 171 Chapter 5 Revisiting the disciplines: Poets inform invention theory and practice There are several generative issues which emerge when I place the interview data into conversation with how the fields of rhetoric/composition and English education view invention. 1 will develop the following four within this chapter: (1) Revision and invention; (2) The affective situation of the author; (3) Hermeneutic invention; and (4) Craft and instinct. While these categories are in no way an exhaustive wringing of the interview data, I have chosen these issues to develop because they hold significant implications for viewing invention across these fields of study. Chapter 6 will interrogate the interviews at the site of invention pedagogy and relate further implications of this dissertation study. Encouraging Conversations Across Invention and Revision In chapter 4, I situated invention within two locations: at the point of tabula rasa (i.e., the blank page, the beginning) and in media res (i.e., invention as taking place within the revision process). While looking across the processes of revision and invention for similarities and difference is not necessarily a new approach, it is certainly an underdeveloped concept within the fields of rhetoric/composition and English 172 education—a surprising fact given that what is alternatively referred to as “deep revision,” revision beyond surface-level considerations, “substantive revision,” “global revision,” and even “radical revision” (Horrring & Becker, Calonne, Eyman & Reilly) are revisions which involve invention. I see these various terms as struggling to describe the occasion when a moment of revision has become a moment of invention or, at the very least, a moment of reinvention. Charles Bazerman, the series editor of “Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition,” writes in the forward to Alice Homing and Anne Becker’s contribution to this series—Revision: History, Theory, and Practicebthat “Working with existing text and improving it has a substantial and finite quality that defines it in ways that elude the more evanescent and complex invention, as reviewed in the first volume in this series.” The first volume in the series that Bazerman is referencing here is Janice Lauer’s work on invention. Bazerman takes a different position regarding invention and revision than I do. In looking at this passage it is clear that invention, for Bazerman, is relegated to the beginning, blank page, tabula rasa moment. Invention stops and revision begins when there is an “existing text” that one may begin “improving.” My thinking about the beginning and ending points of invention and revision derive from the simple observation that writers don’t need to know anything of English eduation’s or rhetoric and composition’s labeling of invention and revision in order to compose successful, lasting, influential works; in other words, writing is a holistic activity (holistic refers to viewing writing as more than the sum of its parts, viewing writing as a process that is recursive and resistant to atomization). Teasing out revision and invention fi'om the larger undertaking that is writing serves a Valuable heuristic 173 purpose, but that heuristic purpose should not confuse the underlying condition that writing is a holistic activity and, as a result, there are no concrete lines between invention and revision. The interviewed writers of this dissertation study confirm this and collectively convey the notion that, while much can be learned by parsing out the writing process into more manageable parts, much can also be learned by remembering that these identified parts overlap and speak to one another in what can be generative ways. The field of creative writing—writers, workshop teachers, writers working at their process—— agrees with my stance toward invention and revision as it generally disregards such static terms in favor of recognizing and valuing idiosyncratic practices and unique theoretical approaches. One of the chapters in the Homing and Becker collection on revision, “Creative Writers and Revision” by David Stephen Calonne, unlike many of the chapters in this collection attempts to problematize the assurnptive distinction so often made between revision and invention within the field of composition and rhetoric: “Indeed, when we study revision, are we studying a discrete activity, or are we confronting the actual genesis of the work of art? One might well argue that the initial ‘bolt from the blue,’ the moment of inspiration is the easy, given part and the hard work of revision is the real creative act” (143). Calonne supports the position here that if invention is relegated solely to the beginning of the writing process—the “bolt from the blue” moment—then invention becomes extra-lingual and reverts back to the position it held during current- traditionalism. It becomes, in Calonne’s words, “the easy, given part” of the writing process. By contrast, if the fields of English education and rhetoric/composition look across invention and revision, both of these important heuristic categories become 174 enriched as invention becomes an ongoing process that takes place on the page as well as before the page and revision takes on the creative significance that Calonne articulates here: Revision dominates the lives of professional authors fi'om the initial inspiration, through incubation and drafting, editing, collaboration and even following the actual publication in printed form and is intimately connected with the creative process itself. Indeed, one might legitimately claim that revision is the creative process (176, italics original). Calonne lends further support to the position that the terms of invention and revision are heuristic terms that oftentimes get misplaced as underlying, universal assumptions about writing by complicating the history of revision: “it was not until Gutenberg’s movable type and the conception of an ‘authoritative’ version of a literary work that the multiple issues and problems of revision have preoccupied scholars” (146). According to Calonne, revision is a historical term that began to take on significance once the notion of “authentic” texts began to surface as a byproduct of mass-distributed, written publication. By extension, the argument can be put forth that invention, as a term, only begins to occupy scholarly attention after the mass printing, after the notion of the “authentic” text surfaces. Indeed, if we take Homer as an example it is clear that the Odyssey in its oral tradition was continually being revised and reinvented as different tales arose fiom different tellers over time. The Odyssey, in this case, is seen as being continually and simultaneously invented and revised as it moved orally from one speaker to the next. 175 There are many examples that illustrate how the lack of a conversation across revision and invention influences the conception of writing. There are also several examples that speak to the interrelatedness of invention and revision. Here is a list of topical contents taken from Daniel and Paula Pearlrnan’s Guide trfirpid Revision: Writing Style, Sentence Correctness, Punctuation, Points of Grammar and Mechanics. This list contrasts with the list of topical contents found within Don Murray’s The Craft of Revision: Write to Rewrite, Rewrite to Collect, Rewrite with Voice, Rewrite to Focus, Rewrite to Form, Rewrite for Order, Rewrite to Develop, Rewrite to Edit, Reading your Reader, Rewrite at Work, and The Craft of Letting Go. The Pearlmans’ text concerns itself with surface-level, stylistic considerations of revision. It does not concern itself with issues of invention; there is an underlying assumption that the writing needs to be cleaned up, that the author is coming to the process of revision having already formulated their ideas. Even their title, which includes the term “rapid,” points toward revision as the final piece of the puzzle, the icing on the cake. Don Murray’s text pairs revision with invention throughout which is established by his motif of rewriting to do something, to find out more, to develop, to focus, etc. These texts are categorically different fiom one another in their approach to revision, and their treatments of invention are the root causes of such differences. To provide a more detailed example I want to take a closer look at Murray’s chapter 1: Write to Rewrite. The idea he develops in this chapter is that writers write first drafts with the intention of revising. These subsequent revisions can do the following: discover that we know more than we thought, change what we feel about what we know, and extend what we know as the draft makes unexpected connections (3). Notice how 176 these writerly moves can be viewed as acts of invention: Murray employs typical action words related to the process of invention such as discover, change, and extend to represent successfirl revision practices. One section of this first chapter is titled with a question: “How do I Create a Discovery Draft?” (9). Understanding the writing of a discovery draft as a means of creating a text which can then be revised simultaneously conflates and dissolves the traditionally distinct processes of invention and revision. The discovery draft is both invention (a new beginning) and revision (it is a necessary step in Murray’s “craft of revision”). Murray’s interview with the author Elizabeth Cooke illuminates this connection between invention and revision further: Murray: How do you develop a draft that may be rewritten? Cooke: Every draft I write will need to be rewritten—that’s what a draft is. It’s a start. Then comes the next draft. And the next, and the next. Each draft is What I Have Said So Far. Rewriting is implicit in the word “draft.” If writing can be compared to a tree, then revision is its process of leafing out. The first draft might be the wintry tree, branches like lace in the sky but leafless. Revision fills out the tree, gives the writer the depth and breadth she needs. It is a disservice to invention to relegate it to the beginning of the writing process alone and it is a disservice to revision to remove invention fiom its process. The following emergent categories from my interviews place invention within the process of revision: 177 The interviews with the five practicing poets yield plenty of illustrations for the category of Places for invention within the text. These authors speak to constructs created within their writing that allow them the space and place to invent. They approach revision as a time to discover something new. Diane Seuss goes so far as to pair revision with evisceration. For Seuss, successful revision challenges the existing text and herself as a writer to re-invent completely. Repeatedly, these writers talk at the way The text informs itself Bill Olsen calls it “listening the poem forward” and Stuart Dybek names it “surrendering to the text.” Both of these processes position the author as being receptive to the work. By flipping the traditional script that positions the writer as shaping the language to fit an intended meaning and instead positioning the writer as allowing meaning to rise fi'om the language, revision becomes a process of discovery, a process of meaning making. In short, this process of allowing the text to inform itself is a revision process that actively listens and surrenders to new insights and meaning (i.e., invention). There are certainly ways to use readers and writing groups in a manner that never gets beyond surface-level revision, but this is more characteristic of troubled student peer review groups than what these authors are speaking to when they bring up Using trusted readers and writing groups:. When Diane Wakoski shares her poems with her writing groups she is listening for tensions, misunderstandings, places where she can re-shape her writing. While she may be thankful to hear that a word is misspelled, these comments are quickly noted so that more important matters can be contended with—matters that relate to global rather than localized considerations, matters that deal with invention rather than surface-level presentation. The same is true of Elizabeth Kerlikowske. When she gives 178 her husband a large glass of whiskey and a poem to read she is listening for where the language fails, listening for places within her text that need further invention/revision. Another. repeated concern among these writers is Discerning when it’s a (real) poem. Discernment becomes an inventive move when the author uses discernment as a tool for deep revision. In many ways these authors speak to the ability to discern the stuff of poetry like riding a bicycle: once you get it you can do it again. Kerlikowske talks about “the first real poem she wrote” as being a momentous occasion because then she could discern (real) poetry from poetry that didn’t quite make the cut. Discernment becomes a process of revision then because the author is equipped with a type of template, or genre awareness, of what constitutes good poetry. Diane Seuss references the famous Emily Dickinson quip when she says of discerning (real) poetry: “The top of your head comes off right? It just feels true.” This type of discernment, based on a symbiotic relationship between craft and emotion, is a revision strategy based on education and experience writing within the genre of poetry. Discernment becomes an inventive act when the poem is deeply revised based on a feeling—or, more accurately, the absence of a feeling—that poetry is happening on the page. These writers speak often about The text as “other, ” and about their relationship to it: The act of viewing the text as other shapes the text before any writing begins. In addition, viewing the text as other shapes the way a text is revised by providing a mental construct by which revision is approached. To put it more concretely: Diane Wakoski’s viewing her poems as her children, as intrinsic beings, shapes not only how she approaches the beginning stages of her writing but the care she brings to the process of revision as well. This approach toward revision, an approach characterized by an author’s 179 relationship to their writing, is a defining moment for the level of revision that will take place. Contrast, for example, a student writer facing revision with the goal of achieving a passing grade, with Wakoski’s approach toward revision described above. The revision process—the depth of revision—will be in measure to the type of relationship developed between the writer and his/her text. And as I have argued from the outset of this section, the deeper the process of revision the more invention comes into play. The situation of the author: revisiting traditional notions of kairos In the writing center where I work we employ the acronym MAPS (Mode, Audience, Purpose, Situation). This heuristic breaks up the writing process into constituent, workable parts for the clients that we peer-tutor. The “situation” in MAPS has two parts to it—the situation of the writing and the situation of the writer. The situation of the writing deals with the logistics of the assignment such as length requirement, citation format, and due date. The situation of the author deals with the conditions under which the writer works best. I ask questions to elicit such information: “Do you write at night or in the morning? Do you compose with music or television playing? Do you need to go to the library or a cafe'?” These are initial, surface-level forays that get the writer thinking about the conditions under which she/he best operate. Further questions would be “How do you begin writing? Do you draft immediately or think for a while? Do you outline? How do you revise?” There are limitless questions that one can ask to elicit this type of thinking on the part of authors, questions that elicit metacognitive thinking about their practices as writers. 180 Many of the questions that I posed to these practicing poets dealt in this arena of the situation of the author. For example, when I asked them to tell me about particular invention practices they employ, their collective responses resulted in this list: 1. The use of visual images. 2. Play with form. 3. Reading unfamiliar work as a way to begin drafting one’s own work. 4. Searching for one’s particular writerly slant as a way to approach a topic in an original manner. 5. Using models and ideal examples from which to extrapolate outwards. 6. Giving oneself overt assignments such as prompts, number of poems within a time frame to write, and apprentice poems. 7. Channeling a particular poem or voice. 8. Breaking old habits and trying unfamiliar ways into writing as a means toward being original and fresh even to oneself. Where are the familiar invention strategies shared by rhetoric/composition and English education? Where are the outlines, Venn diagrams, fi'ee-writes, pre-writes, pentads, tagrnemics, brainstorrns, loopings, and clusterings? It appears these authors had personalized their invention strategies to meet their individual situations as writers. I name this personalized, tailored approach to invention the situation of the author in which these authors have identified and implemented specific invention strategies that seem idiosyncratically appropriate for them. As a provisional definition, the situation of the 181 author refers to the infinite number of personal situational factors that authors must contend with when inventing through writing. What differentiates what I’m speaking to here from what has been traditionally spoken of with regard to kairos are the affective situations that impact the way writing is invented rather than the external conditions alone. It’s not that kairos ignores the situation of the author, but that it has not dealt with the situation of the author to the extent that I propose. There is one more differentiation that needs to be made. While I believe that the term kairos does encompass the type of authorial situation that I’m proposing, I do not believe the fields’ adoption of the term has included the situation of the author—especially in a manner that clearly impacts and integrates with the way the concept of invention is dealt with. Consider the following list of questions, titled “Questions Raised By Kairos,” offered within the textbook Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students written by Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee: 1. Have recent events made the issue urgent right now, or do I need to show its urgency or make it relevant to the present? 2. Which arguments seem to be favored by which groups at this point in time? 3. Which lines of argument would be inappropriate considering the prevailing needs and values of the audience? 4. What other issues are bound up with discourse about this particular issue right now, in this place and in this community? Why? 5. What are the particular power dynamics at work in an issue? Who has power? Who doesn’t? 182 6. What venues give voices to which sides of the issues? Does one group or another seem to be in a better position—a better place—from which to argue? Why? 7. Does one group seem to have a louder voice than the others? Why is this so? Bear in mind that kairos is not only a temporal but also a spatial concept. While this list of questions attends to the traditional aspects of kairos (including relevance, audience, culture, politics, power structures, the multiplicity of positions involved, and the physicalities of venue and voice), they do not attend to the situation of the author. While operating in a default student-mode of interpretation, one is quick to minimize the importance of such situational concerns. I can hear the students whining myself: “I was too tired to write my essay. I had a math exam to study for. My boyfriend/ girlfriend dumped me. I didn’t understand the assignment.” My research, on the other hand, shows that authorial situation is an integral part of the rhetorical situation as a whole, an integral part of kairos that is underdeveloped within the fields of rhetoric/composition and English education. Contrast Crowley and Hawhee’s “questions raised by kairos” (a specific invention heuristic in its own right) with how these interviewed authors speak of their own invention strategies. “It’s that vision that takes you A writer’s slant. Rather than attending to audience concerns, Kerlikowske and Wakoski attend to developing their own particular, individualized view of a topic. This contrasts directly with the manner in which a traditional conception of kairos operates. Rather than adapting to one’s audience, political climate, social circumstances, etc., these authors deliberately withdraw fiom such aspects of kairos in order to attend to a single voice: their own. 183 Entering the linguistic realm. The need to be alone, the need for withdrawal fi'om society and, more completely, from people write large in order to enter the linguistic realm runs counter to traditional notions of kairos. Traditional notions of kairos are more apt to reward the writer who can adapt quickly and deftly to the contextual pressures of the writing event as opposed to rewarding the self-reflective author receding into thought for long periods of time to explore possibilities. Preparing for accidents: Developing an attitude of receptivity. In James Kinneavy’s canonical article, “Kairos: A Neglected Concept in Classical Rhetoric,” he most closely approaches the concept of authorial kairos to which I am attending here. He writes: For the average student in the typical four-year, private or public institution, what should an emphasis on situational context mean? It ought to mean that the student do at least some writing in the area of his or her interests, that is, his or her major, regardless of what it is: physics, mathematics, English, accounting, etc. This means that some sort of writing across the curriculum ought to be incorporated into every composition program that purports to respect the situational context of the student’s personal interests and career choices (232-3). While I do not argue with Kinneavy’s stance, I believe that his notion of “the situational context” of the student does not extend itself far enough. In his example, what I’m naming the situation of the author becomes limited to career choice and a vague sense of “student’s personal interests.” These interviewed poets are not writing themselves into a 184 situation; they are writing themselves out of a situation and into surprise, accident, and continual exploration. The central difference between the stance taken on behalf of kairos by Kinneavy and Crowley and Hawhee and the stance taken on behalf of kairos by these interviewed authors is whether or not to begin (i.e., invent) with content or language. The questions posed by Crowley and Hawhee, and their stance reified by Kinneavy, begins the writing process with content—one must understand, to the best of one’s ability, the rhetorical situation (i.e., kairos) in order to effectively respond and consequently persuade. These writers are not inventing from a position of response or persuasion. They begin with language as a means to explore and find out what they do not know. And they never stop exploring. This is not Peter Elbow’s freewriting activity designed to find what one wants to say, nor is it Don Murray’s writing to learn; it’s writing to continuously explore, be surprised, and discover by happenstance fortuitous accidents. It is a listening the language forward and a surrendering to what the words on the page are saying and where they are directing the author. This contrasts with the ideas of Elbow and Murray who offer up the invention strategies of prewriting and writing to learn as means toward a specific end: figuring out what the author means so that the author can make the final move of saying it. For these poets, there is no final analysis, no final move toward conclusion. This is characteristically a different approach than the one offered by current understandings of kairos within the fields of rhetoric/composition and English education. A useful metaphor comes from Isaac Babel: “A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm, and you can only turn it once, not twice” (from 185 Guy de Maupassant). This view of writing as a lever that can only be turned once is far different from that of traditional interpretations of kairos which would have us turn the lever this way and that, take the lever apart, and survey the crowd for how they would turn the lever. The fields of rhetoric/composition and English education rarely, if ever, view the writing process as an exercise in receptivity. Play with form. The invention strategy of playing with different forms helps to extend my argument. Elizabeth Kerlikowske plays with form as a means of evoking meaning and content. She is not writing in response to anything traditionally associated with kairos or what is synonymously referred to as the rhetorical situation. She begins with language rather than content. In an interview, James Kinneavy paralleled kairos with baseball: Baseball's very important right now, and one time I heard a pitcher, I think it was Bob Lanier, I'm not sure, say "batting is timing, and pitching is disturbing timing." That sounds reductionistic, but it's not, it's very true in many ways. In batting you have to time the bat and the ball, and the pitcher is trying to disrupt that timing, so that you can‘t hit it. Perhaps I’m drawn to this metaphor because I like sports metaphors, but it does articulate his point: kairos is the right time, place, act, and measure coming together in order to hit the baseball successfully. These writers escape the trappings of traditional kairos by not adhering to its underlying assumption of success through audience persuasion. Their authorial situations position success as a writer’s ongoing development as opposed to 186 audience appreciation. This is why Wakoski can claim an elitist attitude, deliberately shunning the average reader, and why Seuss stops writing the poems that everybody wants to hear—in fact, she deliberately disturbs her own timing with wild pitches (“A good day of writing is when I stop being habitual”). There are several references I can make here to writers who deliberately eschew the traditionally associated goals of kairos. For example, I’m waiting for one of my favorite writers—JD. Salinger—to die so I can read the stuff he writes then immediately locks away. (Important qualification: I’m not referring to kairotic ploy; these are writers who deliberately avoid the “benefits” of kairos because their audience considerations are much different than Kinneavy, Crowley and Hawhee are discussing in relation to kairos.) Diane Seuss says, “Nobody gives a fuck about poetry, maybe five people do,” and along with Wakoski and Kerlikowske, she treasures this fact because it enables the shift from writing poetry for external rewards—what I would refer to as the basis guiding traditional interpretations of kairos—to writing poetry for internal rewards—a choice that I’m arguing is central to their personally-developed situations as writers, a choice that positions them to invent through writing in very particular ways. In addition, creative writers eschew audience considerations by adhering to such maxims as, “You can never write for fame or popularity” as that would be to write soullessly. In this case of writing for popularity, the invention stance adopted is a dead branch from the outset. Channeling. Several other themes from chapter 4 buttress the distinction between traditional assumptions regarding kairos and the type of authorial positioning (i.e., situation of the author) these writers employ. Channeling is an inventive move which necessitates an active ignoring of everything associated with traditional notions of kairos. 187 In fact, channeling could not take place as an invention strategy if one were to concern oneself with any of the thoughts resulting from Crowley and Hawhee’s line of questioning. Relevance, audience, culture, politics, power structures, the multiplicity of positions involved, the physicalities of venue and voice—these considerations must be actively repressed in order to invent through channeling. In order for channeling to take place, the author must, immediately and without question, take the position that Kerlikowske does: “I accepted it when it came. I didn’t say, ‘Well that’s really weird.’ I just said, ‘Well let me get a pen.’” Channeling challenges the author not only to ignore issues of kairos, but to attend to paradoxical and unexpected sources of the writing itself. The way that kairos has been traditionally and currently defined privileges content knowledge and contextual understanding as means to successfully invent through writing. These authors reverse this to argue that conscious considerations of the situation, as well as understanding one’s topic too much, can effectively reduce and ruin the writing. The writing loses its inventiveness as it no longer becomes an exploration into uncharted territory. In line with the thinking of Isocrates, they believe that writing does not approximate toward meaning, it constructs and invents meaning. The text as “other, ” and the writer’s relationship to it. Instead of asking such kairotic questions as how can I best persuade my audience, these authors ask how does writing interact with my life? How does writing, as Bill Olsen puts it, “help me to live my life?” This is akin to making the move from an ethos of work to an ethos of art, from painting the side of a barn to painting a barn on a stretched canvas. In many regards they are primarily the same act but the artistic orientation offers a different approach, a different situational positioning on the part of the author. And this orientation—this 188 approach to what the author wants to learn and accomplish through writing—shapes the writing from the moment of invention and on through the revision process. It’s a testament to the term kairos and the larger field of rhetoric that with a quick sleight-of-hand, all I’ve discussed here in terms of the situation of the author could be presented as already included within the confines of kairos. Displaying slant, developing a relationship to the text, listening the writing forward—all these could be construed as devices to persuade one’s audience. My refutation of this claim rests on what I’ve shown here: that the situation of the author is rarely, if ever, discussed within the fields of rhetoric/composition and English education. This augmentation of kairos with authorial situation is a way to extend and deepen the practice and understanding of kairos, and is in line with the thinking of rhetors such as Kinneavy who make the case that kairos is a term in need of continual reclamation and redefinition if it is to stay current and applicable to the changes inherent to the study and practice of writing. The epistemological stance behind traditional notions of mapping the writing process is that writing is equal to the sum of its parts. This is the reasoning behind Burke’s pentad, Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Flower and Hayes’ cognitive mapping—the idea that if we can quantify accurately and comprehensively every aspect of the writing process it will add up exactly to the final product. These interviewed authors operate under a much different epistemological assumption about what constitutes writing and how the separate pieces come together. In fact, their assumptions about writing are so much different—epistemologically—that they don’t go about enacting a writing process from this traditional vantage point of moving from whole to part, from idea to language. 189 These interviewed writers view the situation of the author in a much different light, which impacts the ways they invent through writing. Another assumption at play within traditional notions of mapping the writing process is that the author knows the intended or ideal outcomes of a given writing event. At some point the process of learning writing’s constituent parts breaks down and a move toward inventing one’s own definitions of writing takes over. This is what makes writing a dynamic rather than static symbol system: it is constantly being invented and re- invented by its users. Imitatio: Hermeneutic invention The fields of rhetoric/composition and English education have particularly complicated histories with regard to how they position the triad of text, author, and reader. The literary inheritance of traditional English departments, within which rhetoric/composition and English education are most often situated, privileges a hermeneutic epistemology in which the text is the primary resource and the reader the main actor, thus privileging the interpretive act. The site of interpretation becomes paramount. In the field of rhetoric/composition, the emphasis is distributed quite differently—partially in reaction to this historical inheritance. The author is given the most important role: that of having to negotiate limitless contextual issues (kairos) in order to persuade effectively. The author becomes the major actor as the shift from an interpretive paradigm to a paradigm of production is realized. The text is no longer viewed as subject to interpretation but, rather, is viewed as a means toward presenting a 190 clearly-articulated, persuasive agenda. The writer takes on the privileged position: the position of action. The field of English education, with its charge of teaching both reading and writing, has the dubious task of doing both at the same time—or, I should say, doing both at different times. Peter Elbow’s “Being a Writer vs. Being and Academic: A Conflict in Goals” comes to my mind when thinking about English education’s need to work both ends of this heuristic-hermeneutic spectrum at different times with dexterity and felicity. Michael Leff, in his essay “The Idea of Rhetoric As Interpretive Practice: A Humanist’ 5 Response To Gaonkar,” summarizes my own findings regarding the shifting power distributions between the act of writing and interpreting. Speaking in response to the unqualified binary Gaonkar makes between rhetoric (i.e., writing) and hermeneutics (a binary that attempts to stratify these shifting power distributions), he says, “Instead, we would assume that the tradition is itself complex, that its elements exist in a complex relationship with one another, and that our understanding of this relationship changes as a function of our own interests and preoccupations” (97). For Leff, it is clear that when one looks across this author/text/reader triad, different relationships will be apparent as a result of one’s vantage point. In the article to which Leff is responding, “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science” by Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, the argument is presented that classical rhetoric is geared specifically for production and therefore cannot have any relevance to the interpretive nature characteristic of contemporary rhetoric. While Leff admits that such a claim is not unfounded, that classical rhetoric “surely place[s] emphasis on reading as a resource for future production rather than as an exercise in assigning meaning” (95), he 191 does not agree that such a view of classical rhetoric is incompatible with the study of meaning in texts (i.e., hermeneutics). In fact, he makes a case that more work needs to be done in this area where interpretation can meet production synergistically. Irnitatio is one site where this can happen: In classical rhetoric, the doctrine of irnitatio marked the most obvious intersection between the reading of texts and the production of persuasive discourse. Although this doctrine held a prominent and persistent place in traditional rhetoric, modern scholars have only begun to give it serious attention (97). This call to give irnitatio more attention is precisely where I would like to focus this section. I believe that the way these interviewed authors utilize idealized examples and models is a site where the productive art of writing and the interpretive art of reading coalesce. Diane Seuss talks about imitation as integrating the rhetorical devices of another poet into her own writing. Using Gerald Stern as an example, she discusses how she has imitated the length of his poems and his non-linear narrativistic turns. This integration of Gerald Stern into her writing is both an interpretive and productive act. It is interpretive in that she must identify the rhetorical moves being used by Stern and it is productive in that she is using these moves in order to affect the production of her own writing. I call this type of imitation hermeneutic invention since Seuss is using reading, using interpretation, as a means toward inventing her own writing. Diane Wakoski discusses a similar process: 192 I hate to use the word like deconstructing, but it's taking the model apart and putting it together in a different way. Sometimes that just means plugging your mythology into the poem instead of Wallace Stevens’ or Yeats’. But most people wouldn't recognize the poems that you see as reinventions of some great poem as such; you might not even recognize that. Wakoski discusses here one of the key elements in hermeneutic invention—that of making it new. She is reading, interpreting, and dissecting idealized poems not as a means toward gaining further insight into these poems’ meanings (although this is a secondary outcome), but rather as springboards into her own writing. This is an inventive act wherein the original, idealized work serves a heuristic purpose. Bill Olsen uses reading as a means toward invention. Purposefirlly reading writers unfamiliar to him, Olsen sees this act of reading as informing his own mind and subsequent production of poetic lines. Olsen may be the most obvious example of reading as a site of invention. Stuart Dybek interprets texts as a means toward shaping his own work as well. His interpretation of the way Italo Calvino and J erzy Kosinski counterpoint dialogue and narrative as well as the dramatic mode with the lyrical mode provide him with a blueprint for counterpointing his own choices in genre. There are differences in how these authors are reading from the ways students are taught to read within the tradition of literary studies. This is reading in order to invent. Rather than focusing on content understanding and meaning, these authors are privileging 193 the rhetorical moves employed—the transportable rhetorical elements within a text. My conversation with Stuart Dybek helped me to understand the difference between the ways English departments traditionally treat the act of reading and the ways creative writing departments treat reading: Teaching craft is... primary? Yes, especially in the context of academia where writing, unlike the other arts, is not in a fine arts department but mostly in an English department in which people are mostly taught courses on how to read. Very little attention is ever paid in an English department, in English courses, to craft. So if they don’t get it in the writing classes they’re not getting it. I think that there’s some confusion between what creative writing is about as opposed to what the study of English is about. They ’re competing forces then because a good critic and a good writer are two difierent things. I’m not sure that in an English department courses are about being a critic, Jason. I think they’re about reading, the art of reading. Reading as a... ? You know criticism can be a version of reading and it’s also a long tradition of writing—writing in which the subject is reading and I don’t think that English courses are necessarily about turning everybody into a critic. Primarily they are 194 about acquainting somebody with the history of the language we call English and its literature. 1 Where do you think that confusion comes fi'om then? I think that most of the classes are about reading. One of the things I’ve noticed in my creative writing classes is that people come in there as very good readers and they want to talk about a piece of writing as readers and what I keep trying to get them to do is talk about it as a piece of writing, how it was made rather than what it means. You can’t talk about something totally disregarding what it means but you can have your priorities. Creative writers read to find out how a text “was made rather than what it means.” This is to interpret a text for the sake of production, to herrneneutically invent through imitation—and not strict imitation such as copying, because copying does not require hermeneutics since there is no interpretation necessary to copy. This is an imitation resulting fiom what an author has gleaned from another author. In creative writing circles this is commonly referred to as “reading as a writer.” When my father looks at a piece of furniture he tries to figure out how it holds together, what the steps must have been to make it, how he would have done some things differently if he had made it himself. In essence, he looks at firrniture as a carpenter in the same way that Dybek speaks of looking at texts as a writer. 195 From craft to instinct: Rethinking spontaneity and James Britton ’s “Shaping at the point of utterance ” When I first began teaching they assigned us a mentor teacher whom we were to observe. My mentor teacher was Mrs. Foreman. On Mondays, while the students were filing into her classroom, she would write out her lesson plans for the week on a half- sheet of paper. She was a robust, engaging teacher and her students loved her; year after year parents would petition to get their children into her classroom. At the time I was taking a week to develop a single 55-minute lesson plan and they never worked as smoothly as those few notes Mrs. Foreman was jotting down on a half-sheet of paper Monday mornings. When I asked to look at that sheet of paper she would say, “Sure, but it probably just makes sense to me.” Written on the paper were bulleted points such as: “writing with song, lunchtime prompt, reading time.” I was writing out entire scripts, trying to account for everything I would say and everything I would do—these were hopeful, extensive narratives wherein I tried to write myself into a successfirl class period. It didn’t take me long to recognize what the difference was between our planning strategies: Mrs. Foreman was drawing from years of experience. She had internalized her lesson planning, in particular the classroom management and pacing of her teaching, so that a few notes jotted down were all she needed. Most of the mental, inventive work required of lesson planning had been done over the fifteen years or more that she had been teaching. 196 When I took a position observing student teachers, one of my jobs was to facilitate the communication between student teachers and their mentor teachers. I found that the mentor teachers were making decisions and doing the practice of teaching without adequately unpacking the reasoning behind such decisions and practices for their student teachers. Years of practice had resulted in an effective “forgetting” of the theory and reasoning that informed their pedagogy. There are connections between these anecdotes and the movement these poets make from craft to instinct, but before I delve deeply into this I would like to bring in another voice, that of James Britton in his article “Shaping at the Point of Utterance.” Britton writes: “It is my claim, in fact, that a better understanding of how a writers shapes at the point of utterance might make a major contribution to our understanding of invention in rhetoric” (147). Britton argues that writers shape their arguments on the page in much the same way that speakers shape their arguments, by pushing the boat out from shore (i.e., beginning the act of speaking or writing) and trusting it will come back somewhere (147). This view of speaking and writing is characteristic of what I refer to as the text informing itself—the author is responding to what has been written. This is a familiar theme across these writers and is referred to as “surrendering,” “listening,” and “exploring.” Shaping at the point of utterance is connected to “the value of spontaneous invention” (Britton) as the author, in pushing the boat from shore, is in uncharted territory which can service the writing in a much different and oftentimes better fashion than territory that is fully charted before launch. Britton uses a closing metaphor of oil vs. water-color painting wherein oil painting is representative of the dominant treatment of invention—revising as a means toward finalizing the product—and water-color is 197 representative of shaping at the point of utterance——spontaneous invention practice that gets it right initially in a fresh and original manner. My argument is that successful watercolorists get it right in a quick and fresh manner because they are relying on years of developed craft in order to work in such a way that appears spontaneous, even effortless. Bill Olsen brings this point home even further with this anecdote referencing how successful improvisation (i.e., spontaneity) is a product of discipline (i.e., the development and subsequent sublimation of one’s craft): There’s a Charlie Mingus documentary where he’s just goofing on the piano for his granddaughter, drinking a big bottle of red wine in the meantime and he’s playing brilliant stuff and he’s not thinking about it but what it’s expressing is years and years of dedication and discipline. What that free-form improvisation is expressing is discipline. My research points in a slightly different direction that Britton and is more reflective of this Charlie Mingus anecdote and the anecdote about Mrs. Foreman’s lesson planning. I argue that the spontaneous invention offered by Britton’s shaping at the point of utterance is far from spontaneous, although it may seem to be. Rather than spontaneous, it is the result of sublimating craft which has the effect of improving practice. In James Paul Gee’s, “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction and What is Literacy?” he asserts: “We are better at what we acquire, but we consciously know more about what we have learned.” For Gee, acquisition refers to a process that has been learned tacitly such as learning one’s native language; learned processes refer to 198 processes that have been tacitly learned such as a second language. His point elucidates the fact that practice—the ability to write poetry, for example—improves as conscious knowledge drops, or is forgotten, subsumed. I have been thinking about this process of moving from craft to instinct, from conscious knowledge to sublimated knowledge, from the tacit to implicit, for some time. I continue to see examples of this move in a variety of places: when asked to explain why he’s so good at basketball, Michael Jordan says, “I just play.” When asked to give a tutorial on hitting, Willie Mays had this to say: “You see, I grab the bat and hold it like this. Then I wait for the pitch and swing like this”; and Hemingway was downright scared to discuss his writing process for fear that it would “spook the magic.” These are examples of “talents” who have passed through the conscious learning stage of their particular skills and have achieved the fluent stage that Gee names acquisition. They are called “talents” because there seems to be no way to figure out why they possess the skills they do—they certainly can’t explain it to us. The paradox apparent here is that if they could explain it to us then perhaps they wouldn’t be able to practice their skills with such dexterity. The breadcrumbs have all been eaten. James Britton writes: “The students that offer the least precise rules and plans have the least trouble composing” (151) and this statement is in line with the work Mike Rose has done on writer’s block—the students with the fewest rules, the least conscious knowledge in the traditional sense of dictums and heuristics, are generally the better practitioners of writing. To qualify further: it’s not that successful student writers have no knowledge of rules and plans; it’s that they don’t feel as bound by such rules, they can recognize the heuristic importance without translating such heuristics into dictums. 199 There is an important distinction to be made here between how Gee refers to acquisition and how I refer to it. Gee specifically talks about discourses (i.e., first language, second language, etc.) whereas I am talking about poetry—a genre of writing. For Gee, poetry would necessarily have to be learned rather than acquired. The exciting addition that these interviews offer to Gee, then, is the fact that they have adopted practices to facilitate the acquisition of a learned process. They do this through sublimating craft to the point that it becomes instinctual. They are in agreement with Gee since they too do not see mastery (in the form of fluency such as that found within first- language acquisition) as a possibility—they may strive for such mastery but they are unanimously clear that this is an untenable goal. For these writers, shaping at the point of utterance brings to a point years of developing craft and learning to discern successful poetry. For them, shaping at the point of utterance is much different than it is for a student attempting poetry for the first time. This has profound implications for invention because the lifelong pursuit of converting craft to instinct shapes not only the initial utterance on the blank page but also shapes revision practices. 200 Chapter 6 Poets Speak to Invention Pedagogy: Implications I came to realize in my analysis of the interviews that these poets really didn’t have much to say beyond what is commonly understood as good teaching practice within the fields of composition and English education. Yes, they provided a number of novel teaching exercises as well as insightful theoretical approaches, but these did not stretch my understanding beyond what I had already conceived of as sound teaching practice. This was surprising because I assumed these interviewed poets did have so much to say regarding writerly invention strategies and practices. Upon reflection, however, it does make sense. These poets are certainly teachers—they all comment on their love of teaching and reference teaching as an inseparable part of their lives—but there is a notable difference between their orientations and that of compositionists and English educators: they don’t come to teaching as teachers; they come as writers. Furthermore, they didn’t initially come to teaching out of an impulse to teach, but rather as the result of an impulse to write. Perhaps this is the generative tension between fields that can give rise to implications: the teaching fields of composition and English education have the most to offer to the field of creative writing in terms of pedagogy, whereas the field of creative 201 writing, with its primary focus on writing, has the most to offer composition and English education in terms of insights into writing and the writer. The National Writing Project attempts such interdisciplinary crossover with repeated success. Wendy Bishop, in arguing that composition should be “crossing lines” into the field of creative writing more often, writes: “Teachers don’t have to profess writing, but they should experience it, and that experience, as any graduate of the National Writing Project raining will attest, is life-changing” (194). And fiom the perspective of creative writing, my research shows that this field can learn a great deal from composition studies and English education regarding the tensions inherent in the teaching of writing. Composition studies and English education has carved out this territory, has created a space to identify recognizable tensions. In particular, I noticed the tension between challerring students and enouraging students, the tension between freedom as an inventive heurstic and restriction as an invention heuristic, and the tension between interpretation (hermeneutics) and production (heuretics). The discussion in the previous chapters, combined with interview data on pedagogy yields some suggestive implications. When the poets talk about teaching, these are the significant issues that speak the leudest to pedagogical conversations in the fields of rhetoric/composition and English education. It is my belief that the larger category of writing pedagogy is inseparable from invention because what informs one’s writing pedagogy also informs one’s approach (or non-approach) to invention. You can teach technique but can only encourage the rest 202 The question “Can writing be taught?” is altogether ignored by the compositionist and English educator as both of these fields were born in the classroom with the core philosophy that all students can learn. The field of creative writing, on the other hand, takes serious exception to this rule and has made arguments involving talent and genius, asserting that only the writer can teach him/herself, that heuristics are usefirl yet limited, and that even artistic madness is a source of invention. This question has immediate relevance to invention since how one answers this question—to what extent writing can be leamed—provides insights into how one orients oneself with regard to the teaching of invention. Wakoski: “A long and involved answer would be yes and a short answer would be you can’t teach [students] to be a good poet.” Kerlikowske: “I think you can definitely teach technique. That’s what you can teach. And there’s form and don’t do this and do that, but you can’t teach vision.” Dybek: “[That question has] always seemed so stupid to me.” Olsen: “Those students, they’re on a journey and you can’t take it with them.” Seuss: “I think you can teach someone to write poems. There’s a difference.” 203 I’ve purposefully chosen to record here some of the more cryptic responses to this question because it highlights the need to unpack the question itself further into (1) what these poets think can be taught and (2) what these poets believe can not be taught. Here is Wakoski on the topic of what can be taught: You can teach them to be a better writer. You can teach grammar which is really important, and vocabulary, and make them aware of the fact that they need to read books and have information, and you can show them some great poems and then you can critique their own efforts for grammar, for vocabulary, for paucity of information, or generalizations, and suggest that maybe there’s a poet that they might like to read who’s tackled some of these things. I believe Wakoski is arguing for the teaching of craft and this notion of craft as not only being teachable but as needing to be learned by all poets. It is a commonality across these interviews. Kerlikowske, Dybek, and Olsen take similar stances on the teaching of craft: Kerlikowske: “I think you can definitely teach technique. That’s what you can teach. And there’s form and don’t do this and do that...” Dybek: “What I have to say on the subject is just, and it seems obvious to me, that if you go into a painting class you can figure they can teach you how to mix colors and how to do perspective. If you go into a music class they’ll teach you how to operate your instrument or teach you the art of composition. In other 204 words, the craft can always be taught in all the arts, that’s what you study. When people say you can’t teach somebody to be Beethoven or you can’t teach somebody to be Matisse or you can’t teach somebody to be Charlie Parker well of course you can’t. That’s always seemed so stupid to me. The fact of the matter is that you never hear that with the other arts but you always hear it in writing, that you can’t teach somebody to be Ernest Hemingway. Well, no you can’t [laughter] but just as the other arts have a tradition, a history, and features of craft and you can teach the history, you can teach the tradition, you can teach features of craft, all those things can be taught. And if they’re not learned in a classroom than the person has to learn them on their own and it’s usually some combination. Hopefully you can accelerate what somebody would have to learn on their own.” Olsen: “In my mind the text is the greatest teacher. That’s how I teach classes. Good poetry is the greatest revelation. I guess what you can teach largely is a love of poetry, not only a love of poetry but a trust of poetry. One thing that keeps people from writing well or that closes people down is a actually fear of poetry, a fear of the fieedom it constitutes. We all have internal censors so one thing a teacher can do is try to help a student contend with internal sensors. Aside from teaching the craft which I believe in entirely you have to go easy in teaching, you have to judge how much a person is ready for and that calls for constant ability to read people that no one has all the time.” 205 The question “What can’t be taught?” is much more difficult to parse from these interviews because these poets adopt a variety of stances. There is, however, a common belief that not all aspects of writing can be taught. Kerlikowske, for example, argues that “vision” cannot be taught: “People either have vision or they don’t have vision and you can’t teach that leap. . .fi'om the words to beyond the words. I don’t think you can teach that.” She amends this to a certain extent by saying “I think sometimes you can see a student is going to make that leap and you can say ‘that’s it.”’ She goes on to share a personal anecdote about when this learning moment took place for her: “I remember when Herb Scott did that for me. He said, ‘This is the first real poem that you’ve written’ and I celebrated because I had written zillions of poems before that but I saw how that poem was different and it made that leap to something beyond what it was.” I followed this up by asking her what she meant by the fact that you can’t teach vision. Her response: The vision is being able to know. . .if the student is writing a poem about dogs, can you look at that poem about dogs and see that it could be more than that? Seeing the possibilities of it is vision, looking beyond the page, almost what you would see if you squinted at it and there would be this other poem. Being aware of the possibilities that are out there. I could look at a student’s work and say, “Oh my God you’re two sentences away from being brilliant here,” but it’s not there. When I try to talk to them about what direction a poem could go in they say, “No, I want it to be this.” And I think, “Well, your wanting it is getting in the way of what it is.” 206 Although Kerlikowske takes the position that vision cannot be taught, we can see here that she does take the time to teach vision to her students, and to help students recognize vision in their poetry when it happens, in the same manner that Herb Scott helped her to recognize vision in her own poetry. Here is another anecdotal example of Kerlikowske struggling to get her students to understand poetic vision: I have a student in my class right now, he’s almost my age, and he asks, “Where .do you come up with those bizarre ideas? Are you on acid or something?” I say, “No you just look around.” I was typing to him and I saw a picture of a hat and I said, “The hat is lonely, the snow is this.” This is not hard. Take a verb, take a noun, take an adjective that don’t go together and put them together. But he just can’t. He thinks you have to do something special or you have to be on drugs. That’s his biggest thing, he thinks you have to be on drugs. No you don’t have to be on drugs, you have to loosen up your head. In as much as Kerlikowske strategizes ways to teach vision, she also sees poetic vision as something in existence before learning—more specifically, before education— that one needs to protect. “I feel that we all [have vision] and school unlearns that from us; the process of our education is unlearning to think that way” Kerlikowske is referencing here the problem of conformity that results from being an obedient student, the fact that good poetry comes from thinking outside the norm encouraged by a 207 comprehensive education. Once again she offers an insightful anecdote to help elucidate her point: Especially when I was a poet in schools, there was the kid up by the desk, always a boy, always left-handed, always sitting next to the teacher because she had to keep him in line. I expected great things from that kid because I knew he was my kind of person. He’s a trouble-maker, he would ask questions, he was thinking and that is disruptive in a classroom. Whereas Kerlikowske names the part of poetry that can’t be taught “vision,” Bill Olsen recognizes values and self-motivation as the aspects of poetry that cannot be taught. What can’t you teach? You know what I think it is, you can’t teach a person what to write about. The subject matter has to come to that person, the person has to figure out what he or she values. And that means in art and in one’s experience. You can’t help someone discover his daemon. Those students, they’re on a journey and you can’t take it with them. Sometimes all you can do is swab the decks. That’s not a full, concrete answer but there are other things I guess. If you are going to be a writer you have to be self-motivated. You got to want it yourself. Seeing someone else do it well can be inspirational, you get that from reading. I found that to be true in my teaching experience Jason. 208 Sometimes I’ll want it more for the student than the student wants it and then I’m an imposition and I have to draw back. In a rather surprising similarity to the experience Kerlikowske offers about the time her poetry teacher, Herb Scott, helped her to notice the achievement of poetic vision within her own poetry, Bill Olsen references the way his former teacher helped him to develop as a poet. This anecdote revolves around Olsen’s view of the importance of encouragement: When somebody writes something good sometimes their first instinct is actually to distrust it, to question it, to consider it a fluke because it demands more of them. And I think—I’ve told students this in defense of my teaching methods—- that encouragement is the most demanding form of criticism. I work through encouragement. It worked for me. I had great teacher in Jon Anderson and it worked for his students. If he found a poem he really liked he would stop the class and praise the poem and validate the community and not negate any individual in the class and make the notion possible that “Yes, good poetry can be written and it has just happened.” Another tool that Olsen uses is encouragement, which he calls “the most demanding form of criticism.” To Olsen’s thinking, encouragement is difficult for students to deal with because students no longer have the option of naming a success a fluke. Another reason success is difficult to accept is that the creative process, when 209 successful, is a disruptive process: it uproots prior notions and takes the author to a different plane of understanding and, ultimately, being. This relates closely to Olsen’s notion of helping students contend with internal censors—censors such as fear that can stunt and inhibit a student writer’s development as a poet. Diane Wakoski discusses what can’t be taught in two ways that are, eventually, very closely related. In a turn that is directly in line with Olsen’s self-motivation comment (“You got to want it yourself”), Wakoski forwards the argument that you can’t teach someone to want to be a poet. But will they learn [aspects of craft]? If they have some kind of aptitude for language and are really interested in poetry as an art form then yes, they will. But there are people with aptitudes for language who really rebel against the kinds of firings that poetry does and so I don’t think you can teach them to be poets because they don’t want to be. If you said, “Well what if they want to be?” Well, what if I had a crippled leg and I wanted it not to be crippled? I probably couldn’t do anything about it. If they don’t want to be poets then they don’t want to be poets and I don’t believe in brainwashing. I think that my one experience is that you can make anyone who writes and is willing to do the same amount of work that they would do in a math class into a better writer. In addition to the argument that you can’t teach someone to want to be a poet, there are several other ideas present that relate to the question of what can’t be taught. First is the notion of an “aptitude for language,” which for Wakoski is closely related to the idea of 210 talent. “I and my generation believe in something called talent,” she says, “although I don’t necessarily think you can test for it. That’s what my generation believed.” Wakoski makes an argument for talent while also holding to her belief that you cannot teach someone to want to be a poet: When I see people in beginning classes they are people who have truly bad educations and people who have better educations and sometimes the person with truly bad education has more talent for writing poetry than the person with the good education so there is something to this talent thing. I’m not saying it’s immeasurable, I’m just saying right now we don’t have good measures for it. If you combine talent with education then there is one more ingredient and you know what that is, you have to want to do it. And lots of talented people are multi-talented and lots of well educated people are educated in various things and sometimes they lack the desire to do even one of those things, at least in a primary way. The second argument embedded in Wakoski’s response is that you can teach someone to be a better writer but that doesn’t mean they will become a successful poet. Wakoski is firm in her conviction that she can make anyone who walks into her classroom a better writer and she also believes that she can help people to think like a poet: Can you make them think like a poet? Well, thinking like a poet means thinking metaphorically and that means being interested in abstract things that are 211 explained by concrete things and finding unusual and beautiful language. I don’t know why you couldn’t help them improve what they’re doing. The important qualifiers here are “better writer” and “improve what they’re doing” and they relate back precisely to what fi'ustrates Stuart Dybek about the nature of the question itself as to what can and cannot be taught. “That’s always seemed so stupid to me. That fact of the matter is that you never hear that with the other arts but you always hear it in writing, that you can’t teach somebody to be Ernest Hemingway.” Diane Seuss says, “I’m a good guide but I can’t teach them.” This is a common response from these poets—the idea that the teacher can serve as a guide, even an accelerant as Dybek put it, but final onus is placed on the writer him/herself. Looking across these authors we see an insistence that features of craft can be taught. Beyond that, the art of poetry is elusive. Kerlikowske references “vision” as being un-teachable, Wakoski references that unquantifiable notion of “talent,” Olsen talks about “values” and “self-motivation” as important features of the poet that cannot be passed along, and Dybek vents fi'ustration at the question itself because he feels that writing gets burdened by this question more often than do the other fine arts. Nevertheless, all of these authors have made it their job to help writers. As Dybek says, “Hopefully you can acCelerate what somebody would learn on their own,” which is a surreptitious way to find a place between these tensions of what can and cannot be taught because, on the one hand, this statement places the burden of learning/developing on the shoulders of the writer while on the other hand it creates a space for the teacher to still be helpful. 212 What does this tell us about how these writers position invention? In the final analysis it seems clear that they believe that writers are ultimately responsible for developing their own inventive processes. What can’t be taught, according to these poets, are the hi ghest-order concerns such as vision and recognizing when a poem has reached that level. The lower-order concerns of craft are entirely teachable but the highest-order concerns do not operate under the same set of rules. Ambiguity, paradox, chaos, surprise—these characterize the place of poetic vision that a writer has to navigate for him/herself. Olsen says, “they’re on a journey, you can’t take it with them.” Seuss says, “I’m a good guide but I can’t teach them.” Wakoski says, “You got to want it yourself.” Kerlikowske says, “You can’t teach vision.” There is a clear message here that the successful invention of poetry, while possibly aided by good teaching, is ultimately a task unto oneself. Accelerants as eflective teaching “Draw the space between the objects, not the objects.” My Drawing 101 teacher would repeat this again and again, trying to get us to understand the concept of negative space. And then one day it finally made sense to me. Years of beginning my drawings by outlining the objects before me were suddenly called into question and I started to begin with outlining the negative space—the space between obj ects—in order to get the relationship between objects correct from the outset. This paradigm shift was a sudden realization to me even though my art teacher was exasperated and frustrated by the time I finally understood what he was after. In some ways, this insight might be seen as 213 happening as a result of repetition, or of good direction—however, one speaks about it, it functioned to get me to the next level of drawing. My writing teacher’s words were a necessary accelerant to my writing development. I remember my first course with Stuart Dybek in much the same manner. The class was titled “Forms in Fiction.” He would hand out short writing pieces as examples and I wanted to talk about what the pieces meant, how the author was representing characters and building themes. I was this student that Dybek references: One of the things I’ve noticed in my creative writing classes is that people come in there as very good readers and they want to talk about a piece of writing as readers and what I keep trying to get them to do is talk about it as a piece of writing, how it was made rather than what it means. ...especially in the context of academia where writing, unlike the other arts, is not in a fine arts department but mostly in an English department in which people are mostly taught courses on how to read. Very little attention is ever paid in an English department, in English courses, to craft. So if they don’t get it in the writing classes they’re not getting it. It finally dawned on me during the course of the semester that I was bringing to bear a full repertoire of reading skills that I had derived from years of schooling and years of teaching such skills. In much the same way that I finally shifted my paradigm to understand and literally see negative space, I can remember just as distinctly the moment 214 I began to see writing as examples of craft at work, examples that could be reverse engineered in a move that lent insight into how they were made. This paradigm shift accelerated my understanding and practical approach to writing. The title of this section, “Accelerants,” borrows from Dybek’s view of creative writing pedagogy—“Hopefully you can accelerate what somebody would have to learn on their own”—and my own experience of learning to read as a writer. This section deals with those elements of teaching that these authors have found useful in their own classrooms when working to accelerate students’ understanding of the creative writing process. Dybek succinctly articulates his position on this issue: “I think craft stimulates the imagination and sometimes becomes inseparable from it.” He adds, “I have over years of teaching found certain exercises, in certain situations for certain people, do in fact seem to generate some imaginative work but, for me, that’s secondary to teaching craft.” Dybek in fact makes the point that positioning oneself as a teacher and stimulator of the imagination has its drawbacks: “Can you teach somebody to be more imaginative? I think on rare occasion you can by devising certain exercises but that’s gravy. I’m a little wary of people who put all their energy in that direction actually because sometimes I think it can become autocratic.” In addition to telling his students that “Good poetry is the greatest revelation” and helping students “contend with internal sensors,” Bill Olsen talks about helping writers develop by providing them with an example of a poet’s life, structuring the workshop away from consensus, and discouraging students from relying on explanation in their writing. 215 Some of it is instruction by example—at least it was for me with my best teachers—they provided an example, a representational of a good life, a life I would be interested in living. I think that instead of the social construct called the “workshop” leading people to common denominators and something like consensus, an ideal workshop leads people towards divergent paths. It helps to have fiiends, ad-hoc friends, and fiiends tell other fiiends when their work is going awry [laughter]. ...tlre instant I hear a student saying, “I wanted the poem to do this” I instantly distrust the poem. My guess is that the poem has been over consciously directed towards event. Several interview excerpts from Diane Wakoski, already referenced, provide many insights into her pedagogical accelerants: 0 Over the years she has developed the notion of trope to help guide student instruction. 0 Revision is the cornerstone of her instruction: “Even the crappiest thing could be made better by some kind of revision. . ..” 0 She prides herself on being a good critic which means “finding order in somebody else’s writing.” She continues to say “The primary task of a critic is to work with good writing and to show people how much better than they might think it is that it actually is.” 216 0 “You can teach them to be a better writer,” she says, in terms of craft. Additionally she encourages her students to read books and introduces them to poets that might be tackling the same problems they are struggling with. 0 She reasons that a teacher can help students think like a poet by encouraging students to think metaphorically. Teaching writers to use "inventiveness" According to these poets, iventiveness includes specific approaches but is more importantly a mindset. When I spoke with Wakoski about viewing writing as an act of presentation rather than viewing writing as an act of discovery, she had this to say: Well, you know from seeing enough beginning writers that everyone begins with writing as an act of presentation and when they say “I can’t think of anything to write” it’s because they have nothing to present to you and when they do have something to write it’s because they broke up with their girlfriend or they went on a trip and saw cherries on the tree for the first time or whatever, they have something to present to you. Fiction writers want to present characters and/or plot. . .fiction writers are more likely to have to work with having something to present. But poets, you say I feel like writing a poem, you have nothing to present and so then you have to use your inventiveness. And that’s something that most beginning writers don’t know how to access. I won’t say they don’t have it, I’ll say they don’t access it. 217 The distinction made here between beginning writers and established writers, as well as the distinction made between fiction writers and poets, is useful in understanding not only Wakoski’s view toward the teaching of poetry but also the writing of poetry. For Wakoski, student writers need help developing their inventiveness when nothing is present in the real world to evoke enough emotion within them to write, to express something on the page. This is when student writers need to use their “inventiveness,” as she calls it, in order to cull enough drama from their memories to get them writing. This is certainly a representative view of Wakoski’s own process as much as it is representative of what she feels her students go through. The old adage that we teach to ' ourselves as learners comes to mind here. The distinction made between what fiction writers do and what poets do is an important one also in terms of Wakoski’s pedagogy. Having been in her poetry classes and poetry workshops with Wakoski, I know that a familiar phrase she uses to help developing writers understand poetry is “that’s not what poetry does, too much narrative, too much explanation, there’s no mystery here.” Elizabeth Kerlikowsk writes alongside her students using techniques such as free- writing prompts and has them experiment with different forms just as she does during her own periods of invention. She believes that one can “definitely teach technique” and although she doesn’t believe poetic vision is wholly transferable, she continues to encourage students to look at their writing in new ways with new possibilities. When I asked her about the separation of the creator and editor she spoke to the difficulty students have with this concept: 218 [The creator and editor] have to be utterly separate. I mean that’s the problem with students. They say, “I have to have the perfect first sentence for my paper,” and I tell them, “no, you don’t.” But they think they do and a lot of people have writer’s block because they can’t start with the perfect line and I’m way beyond that. I can write a whole bunch of shit and when I finally hit the perfect line I know it. The adage about teachers teaching to the way they themselves learn applies here as well since Kerlikowske is continually moving back and forth between how she learns as a writer and what she teaches. “I pay attention to these observations that I’ve come across,” she says, “and they seem to hold true and I try to teach that in my freshman composition courses.” Similarly to all the poets interviewed, Kerlikowske references the fact that students are much more presentational than they need be in their writing: Well, they had something in mind when they started and by god that’s what it’s going to be even if it’s not that. And I want to say, “Let it go here, that’s where it should go” and they say, “No, it needs to be this, that was my plan.” Yes, students will think, “The assignment was this.” I try to tell them, “The assignment was this but if you get a better idea for Christ-sakes do that.” , 219 This notion that students should let their writing lead them, even if it takes them away from the aims of the assignment, is consistent with Kerlikowske’s view of education in general. I feel that we all do that and school unlearns that fiom us; the process of our education is unlearning to think that way and if you can hang on to your thinking through school and get through that then you are ok. But if you’ve been a good student then you will be just like him. For Kerlikowske poetry is an act of professing one’s individuality, an act of stepping outside the norm and pushing one’s unique thoughts into the world. She recognizes national schooling as a move toward making students obedient and believes this directly counters what poetry is all about. This is in contrast Diane Wakoski and Bill Olsen who forward the notion that education can enable poets. There is a fine line then between education as a push toward conformity and education as a scaffold toward higher thinking. Although these poets differ as to the purposes of education, they each make conscious strides to construct their classrooms as places where inventiveness is rewarded and can “happen.” Teaching inventiveness manifests itself most directly in the assignments that writing teachers assign to their students. For Bill Olsen and Diane Wakoski, the workshop model is the dominant construct in the classroom. Bill Olsen visualizes his writing workshop as encouraging poets toward divergent paths. Kerlikowske, being a community college instructor, politicizes the workshop more directly than most writing 220 teachers by helping her students learn the language of successful vocations. In order to do this she adopts a political pedagogy in which she informs her students of the need to code-switch. But at the same time you can’t talk this way and get a job in a bank. You just can’t do it, that’s how it is. So I try to approach even teaching in a very political way and say, “They’re looking for a way to not give you that job. Don’t give it to them. Get the job, talk how you want to, but know that you have to write like this. Diane Seuss calls herself “a real assignment-driven teacher.” Her approach to assignments, and the assignments themselves, provides a clear view of her approach toward the teaching of invention: 1 set up uncomfortable assignments. I do a lot with randomness, with time limitation, with “you have eight lines and these emblematic words that you’ve chosen, write a poem in eight rrrinutes.” As they get better, as they grow, we read D.A. Powell, who’s dying of AIDS, who’s writing this way and then I'ask them to turn the paper sideways and see what happens if they fill a page with lines of that width. So a lot of it is stuff that I ask them to do structurally which makes them uncomfortable. For Seuss, successful invention is a re-invention every time, a breaking of habits and expectations into the new and unexpected. This pedagogical approach is the same as her 221 personal approach toward invention in her own writing. This approach that challenges students to step outside of their comfort zones rather than encouraging them to develop at their own pace. “You have to rise up to it,” she says of the types of forms assigned in her classroom. She is certainly Bartholomae before she is Elbow. Another way that Seuss teaches inventiveness is through limitation. For Seuss, limiation is creative. Right, that’s why in high school when their creative writing teacher comes and says, “I want you to go out and write a poem about nature”—what’s that? It’s so open-ended that it cuts the process. That’s right. No. Go outdoors and find a walnut and crack it open and look inside of it and taste it and then put yourself inside of there and write on the walls in side-lines, then maybe that will be interesting. That’s a great prompt. So it’s setting people up to have to invent. Notice how similar this pedagogical move and explanation is with what Anis Bawarshi claims of genre: “Genre. . . places writers in positions of articulation,” or how similar this is to Rollo May’s assertion that “Form provides the essential boundaries and structure for the creative act.” Here is Diane Seuss again: Here’s the first thing I ever have my students do, so say you are one of my students, so I hand you this [digs into her bag and gives me a small, decorative 222 change-purse] and I say write a five-line autobiography and this has to be in every line. You name it and you tell me the story of your life in five lines with that in every line. Well that’s a ridiculous assignment, and you know what? They’re brilliant at it. Limitation is creative. Limitation is creative. And yet, Seuss also talks to her strategies of breaking students out of their habits of mind into new, unexplored territory. Herein lies a dichotomy: lirniation is creative and freedom is creative. The teacher's job, then, is to find the appropriate moment to utilize limitation or freedom and do so in the appropriate measure. In her final assessment—which mirrors that of Olsen, Wakoski, Kerlikowske, and Dybek— students must eventually be left to their own devices to explore, reflect, and play their writing lives into existence. Rollo May says “the freedom of artists to give all the elements within themselves fi'ee play” is the sine qua non of creativity—a thesis which counters his other thesis that form provides the necessary structure for creativity. So which is it? Well, it’s both. In the same manner that good teachers deploy both challenge and encouragement along with all else in between, good teachers deploy both structure and freedom and all shades between and they try to do so at the appropriate time and with the appropriate measure. Bill Olsen says “Aside from teaching craft which I believe in entirely you have to go easy in teaching, you have to judge how much a person is ready for and that calls for constant ability to read people that no one has all the time.” The Lauer/Berthoff debate reflects this tension between viewing fi'eedom as the precursor to invention versus viewing restriction as the precursor to invention, and listening to these poets helps us to see that it's both. Invention heuristics can serve as 223 blocks to invention as Mike Rose and Sondra Perl illustrate. Invention heuristics can also serve as tools of convention, shaping the way students perceive and respond to the world. Invention heuristics can also be the necessary scaffold toward new insights. Invention heuristics can also create spaces within which resistance can take focus and shape. Anis Bawarshi makes this argument by claiming that genres are enacted by writers and act upon writers. Rollo May claims that language itself is at once used by, and uses, the writer. One important pedagogical deliverable of this analysis is that in order to foster invention teachers need to enable their students to more often take advantage of form, limitation, and genre as opposed to being taken advantage of by form, limitation, and genre. Talk about poetry: Metacognition Whereas Stuart Dybek and Diane Wakowski certainly demonstrate through these interviews that they are deeply and sophisticatedly aware of their writing process on a metacognitive level, they do not speak to this metacognitive awareness directly. Elizabeth Kerlikowske and Bill Olsen, however, do speak to this type of metacognitive thinking and they echo the positive effects of such intellectual work. Kerlikowske: I think the more you know the better and I think knowing how you work is really crucial. I’m mystical in that I recognize that there is mystery in the process but I’m not mystical in that I don’t believe that if I talk about it I will be 224 robbed of that power. That’s really just superstition, and I don’t think I’m a very superstitious person so my writing wouldn’t be either. Olsen: I rather like talk about poetry. That’s part of what poetry offers, a subject to talk about. I like exchange about poetry and I don’t mind talking about my own methods because it’s one of the ways artists learn from each other. What’s interesting to me about metacognitive thinking and talk is how it’s seldom given credit by creative writers for leading to successful productiOn of creative texts. There is actually quite a bit of scorn heaped on “academic” thinking or even creative works that reference themselves as being a creative work (W akoski hates poem about poems, for example). On the other hand, the fields of composition and English education view reflective, metacognitive work as perhaps the premier indication of sustained learning. Students aren’t viewed as having achieved mastery over a topic until they can accurately explain the steps leading to their conclusions. This applies to invention pedagogy within composition and English education classrooms but not to creative writing classrooms. In fact, Wakoski, “That’s why you should never explain your poems, it takes all the magic away.” There are two different educational paradigms at work here: one that views success based on a student’s ability to explain process and one that views success based on one’s ability to suppress and sublimate process. Coleridge claimed to have woken from a dream and written "Kubla Khan" in a fit of ecstasy. Only later did scholars come to believe there were several drafts written over several years before 225 publication. Obviously Coleridge knew something about marketing the inherent mystique surrounding the invention process of poetry. In the conversation about invention that emerges fro putting these disciplines side by side, it seems apparent that metacognitive thinking and work needs to be infused into the field of creative writing more than it typically has been. The fields of rhet-comp and English education can serve as models for the field of creative writing in this regard, models of fields which have utilized this type of thinking as means to enrich conscious understanding of both writing practice and pedagogy. Teaching aflects one ’s writing Although popular lore would have us believe that creative writers only teach in order to support themselves while writing, I found when talking with these authors that teaching influences their writing in a positive manner. Diane Wakoski provides a strong example of a writer who has changed her writing over the years as a result of her teaching practice: People often ask me how my poetry has changed as a result of teaching, and I’ll say for years that it did not change at all. But in the last decade, the result of being a really close reader, a critical reader of poems, and having to go into a beginning class with the notion that even the crappiest thing could be made better by some kind of revision has made me really interested in that process and I have a form to work with: the idea of trope. 226 Wakoski did not go into the field of teaching with the notion that it would at all contribute to her writing, but rather came after several years to view teaching as affecting her writing. As her poetry writing practice transformed fi'om raw energy and a reliance on first drafts to controlled and heavily-revised work, she takes stock of how this move corresponds with her pedagogy. ltlrink I’m a good critic. I honed that skill teaching poetry writing and feeling as though it was my obligation to critique people’s poems. I know lots of creative writing teachers don’t feel that is their obligation but I do. I actually enjoy doing it and it’s a way of finding order in somebody else’s writing and it is an act of invention because sometimes you find things—here we go to subtext or subconscious—that the poets themselves didn’t know were there and it doesn’t matter if they do or they don’t but they add to the way other people can read the poems. Elizabeth Kerlikowske is the poet who most aligns her teaching and her writing. “I do a lot of writing with my students,” she says and when I asked her if teaching took time away fi'om her own writing she responded, “Oh it takes time but obviously if I’m still teaching than I’m getting more out of it than what I’m spending; and I learn stuff from my students.” She went on to relate an experience in which a student helped her to see language use in a new and exciting manner: “This woman wrote a paper and in it wrote, ‘My Grandmother really put her foot in this dish’ and I said ‘What? That sounds 227 awful’ and she said, ‘No, that means she made it really good, put her foot in it.’ I love that kind of talk, to me it’s so exciting.” What is the most telling about Kerlikowske’s connection between her writing and teaching is that when I asked her to describe an ideal afternoon during which she wrote a piece that went on to be published, she talked about her invention process and how it began in the classroom with her students: We had these writing prompts for five-minute stories and Thursday night we did those in class and then Saturday night when I had time to look at them I was able to say these are really good I’m going to work on them. Doing that speed writing thing really helps tap into the unconscious so quickly that I think it’s good to clear everything away and just go and give yourself random stuff because then you find out what you are thinking. I never would have written either one of those pieces without some sort of weird prompt fi'om the universe. Bill Olsen shares in the belief that teaching positively impacts his own poetry and, like Kerlikowske, he is quick to share that he considers himself working alongside his students. Jerell said, “I’d pay for the privilege of teaching”—now I wouldn’t go that far and sometimes teaching is a press on time but I think it keeps you honest. It means you have to be coherent and presentable, if you will, and maintain the interest of a group of people for a while, or work among a group of people for a while. I 228 suspect I’ve learned more from my students through the years than I’m aware of and I’m not being disingenuous. I continued the conversation by asking Olsen directly whether or not he believes teaching has helped his writing. His response: Sure, if I teach what I love then of course. There are times when I’m reading gobs of student poems and then I just feel swamped; there are those few weeks in semesters. But I’m encouraged by students when they make discoveries. It’s encouraging. It makes me feel good about myself. It makes me feel confident. Yes, I think it helps me to write. Diane Seuss makes a strong connection between teaching and the writing of poetry: So you see teaching then influencing positively your poetry and vice versa. Oh yes. Time-wise it’s tough. I’d probably write a lot more if I wasn’t teaching but to me. . .you know that exercise where I give the student the object and they write their autobiography? Well I give them one, and let’s say I gave you that one [the change purse]. And I ask them to smell it, touch it, get to know it for a few minutes and then they are all attached to it and I say give it away. So before they write they end up with a different one and that’s the one they end up having to write about. Well, that’s my first lesson in that story: that writing isn’t just about 229 your little lair, it’s also about giving it away, constantly giving it away, giving away the ego, giving away the resolution, and giving it away to other people who are coming up. It’s an intricate web that Seuss spins here: Writing is about letting go, giving away ego, giving away the perfect conditions for writing. Teaching is, for Seuss, a way to give, a way to live and write without the perfect conditions. There’s an anecdote that Dybek used to share in class: he had a friend who spent a year building the perfect desk to write the great American novel. He had another fiiend who spent that same year jotting notes to himself on scrap pieces of paper on the subway ride to and fiom work. Guess which one ended up with the published novel? The lesson on invention is clear in both cases: Seuss teaches writing the way that she lives it by giving up the perfect inventional situation and choosing to invent in the imperfect space she does occupy. Authors repeatedly talk about the myth of inspiration, how inspiration comes from sitting down every day to write at the same time rather than waiting for some utopian moment to find them. This anecdote offered by Seuss shows her weaving together the teaching of invention with her own theoretical approach toward the nature and quality of inventive practice. While each of these poet-teachers speak to teaching as affecting their writing in a positive manner, this is not a highly valued, or much-discussed, fact within the field of creative writing. Based on listening to these poets, it is my contention that the landscape of creative writing would be vastly improved if more poet-teachers spoke to the connections between their work and teaching lives. Most specifically, the teaching of creative writing could be improved if the paradigmatic shift were to take place from 230 viewing teaching as getting in the way to viewing teaching as an accelerant to the development of one’s own writing. Certainly Wendy Bishop serves as a primary example of a scholar working within the cross-hairs of rhet-comp and creative writing as she struggled to make these connections between her own writing and teaching. Pedagogical Implications The purpose of this section is to draw out several pedagogical implications resulting from this interview data. These implications are both immediately useful to classroom practice—they present various avenues of thought which enrich practice—and speculative—these implications name areas and pose questions where future work can provide greater insights. What happens when we bring two of the points mentioned in this chapter—“You can teach technique but can only encouraging the rest” and “Accelerants as effective teaching”—back into conversation with the teacher-oriented fields of English education and composition/rhetoric? These interviewed writers do not share the common assumption that all students can be taught to be great writers, an assumption which English education and composition/rhetoric do not question. This belief that not all student writers will make good creative writers manifests itself in the guiding idea that not everything associated with writing can be taught. There are parts of the writing process that one either comes prepared with (i.e., talent) or that one must develop autonomously. Examples of identified un-teachable elements of writing include the development of a writer’s slant and poetic vision. 231 I can remember one former student of mine—I will call him Alex—who begged me for days to go flying with him. He had a small airplane at a local airport and he wanted to take me on a short flight. I had seen him fly over my soccer practices several times and I certainly was intrigued by the possibility of taking off into the sky, but he was doing very poorly in my course and I didn’t want it to appear that his performance was acceptable. What’s more, it was the worst kind of poor student behavior: he had the intelligence and ability but simply wasn’t doing the work. He rarely turned in assignments and was constantly tuning out during class. It seemed the only thing that animated him was talking about flying so after a few weeks I decided to take him up on his offer. I met him at the airport which wasn’t much more than a long concrete driveway. When he took a parachute out of his truck and had me strap it on my back I began to get nervous. “Just for precaution,” he said and added, “it’s the law.” He told me where to step on the wing in order to get into the plane and my level of anxiety shot up again when he informed me that if I stepped in the wrong spot my foot would go through the plane’s wing. What kind of wing is going to keep us up in the air, I thought, if I can poke a hole through it with my foot? The flight was something I will never forget. We flew along the coast and waved to surfers, he pulled a couple of stunts that he had been practicing such as dropping to achieve zero G’s, and by the time we landed I had a thousand questions. Where did you learn how to fly? How often do you practice? What did you have to do to get your license? He answered them all for me and I learned that he had convinced his parents to put the money they were saving for his college fund into buying and fueling the plane, 232 that he already had a job lined up flying commercially after graduation, and that the previous month he took second in an aerial stunt competition. My mind was at work for the entire drive home struggling to incorporate a new vision of students. For the first time I began to realize that I should not treat all my students as if they were going to be English majors in college. What’s more, not all of them even wanted to attend college. This was a new way of thinking that made me a better teacher because I became much more empathetic to the situations of my students. I found ways to elicit from students what they wanted out of life as opposed to assuming my previous English teacher stance of holding them to a standard more appropriate to college English majors. My approach toward writing assignments, for example, moved from “This is what will be expected of them in college” to “What assignments will most engage this particular group of students and highlight their talents and lived experiences?” These interviewed writers speak to the same phenomenon in which they have moved away from a standard, idealized view of writing in favor of viewing student writing as an individual journeys toward divergent ends (see Olsen interview). Sam Schacht, an actor and acting teacher at the Actors Studio in the New School reiterates this pedagogical positioning in which view success as a plural rather than singular standard. “I don’t encourage a kind of guru relationship because I think it’s important for students to learn to think for themselves. I very much encourage my students’ independence of my pearls of wisdom. I absolutely am not a believer that there is some platonic ideal, that there is one right way to do something” (McLarin, 3). The fact that these interviewed authors speak to “accelerating” student learning in indicative of having internalized the pedagogical stance that students are the determiners 233 of their own educative development. Accelerating student development is a phrase with much different implications than, say, constructing or even scaffolding. Accelerating is a much less invasive term and, as a result, places the onus of learning on the student. To quote Sam Schacht again: “. . .it is the students’ jobto decide what is significant and what isn’t, what to accept and what to reject. Each artist has to integrate what he learns from others with what he feels intrinsically to be true. Indiscriminate absorption of technique or philosophy is a cop-out.” My brother is big into weight-lifting. He researches vitamins and diet supplements, is always experimenting with a different work-out regimen and spends his money on the latest equipment. He commented to me recently that he had stumbled upon an intemet site that had published interviews with prison inmates focused on their work- out practices and approaches. Across the board these inmates spoke to the need to be extremely adaptable—most prisons have very limited space, if they have any equipment it’s usually piecemeal and outdated, and prison life comes with more distractions than any neighborhood gym. The confines of the space had actually made these prisoners more inventive, finding ways to workout when/where/how they could in the time they had. These interviewed prisoners also universally rejected the gains of vitamins and diet- supplements, of which they had no access, in favor of hard work and “getting down to it.” They also rejected the idea instilled by most physiological research that rest and down- time were important to building muscle, favoring instead a much more intense work ethic that does not account for down-time. When asked if writing workshops discouraged young writers, Flannery O’Connor is said to have replied, “Not enough of them.” I don’t doubt O’Connor’s underlying 234 insistence on such a thing as talent and proclivity, but there is another way to read this as well: all too often the writing workshop, and schooling writ large by extension, caters to students in a manner that proves counterproductive. O’Connor’s underlying position, and — the argument forwarded by these interviewed prisoners, is that the responsibility for gains—be it writing or weight-lifting—is squarely placed on the individual The most determining factor in success is not the structures in place to support development but the ability to develop oneself regardless of external conditions. I am currently teaching a course in English education and it strikes me how invasive the field of English education becomes in light of how these authors speak to their own teaching practice and writing development. By trying so hard to raise every students to a certain standard the high school English course oftentimes results in making students dependent on a curriculum that tells them how to think. Outcomes of this model are reflected in students who ask if something is going to be graded (and how much) in order to assess their targeted engagement level, and an entire culture that looks to schooling as a type of extended, even de-facto parenting unit. The art of teaching for these interviewed authors becomes an art of responding and reacting to students. The questions which accompany such a pedagogical paradigm shift are far-reaching. For example, how can a teacher construct a syllabus before a class ever convenes if he/she wants to consider building a curriculum around accelerating rather than structuring student development? How does a syllabus account for students’ affective needs? How does a teacher go about assessing whether a student is ready to be pushed (a la Bartholomae) or encouraged (a la Elbow)? 235 The affective situation of the author needs more attention within the fields of composition and English education. How would a curriculum taking into account students’ affective dispositions operate? What would that look like? What could that do for writing instruction? For the fact that rhetoric/composition and English education are primarily education-centered fields, there is too much generalization of students within the existing scholarship. How could the rhetoric/composition and English education pedagogical perspective enable students to move from a perspective of writing for school purposes (i.e., demonstrating understanding) toward a perspective of inventing through writing for personal gain/interest/inquiry? All too often, these fields simply ignore the ethos of the writer choosing instead to focus on the ethos of audience. As a result, schools have co-opted writing from students and made it a tool of conformity rather than a tool for exploration. How can we enable students to use writing in a way that helps them live their lives in the manner that Bill Olsen references? The pedagogical tensions identified within this chapter—Challenging students to develop and/or Encouraging autonomous development; Freedom as invention and/or Restriction as invention; Interpretation and/or Production—are tensions which affect all three of these fields. The important questions become: How are these fields going to incorporate and extend beyond these tensions? How will they utilize these tensions as locations for generative scholarship? Writing studies needs to move beyond these tensions by viewing them as insightfirl (informing writing studies), relative (in relation to how one is situated—as writer, reader, or audience), and ultimately as sites of invention (these tensions can inform one in a generative fashion). Specifically, how can writing studies assess students in a manner that helps teachers discover if a student needs to be 236 challenged or encouraged? When is the invention process aided by restriction? When is the invention process aided by fi'eedom? How can writing studies best view invention from both reading and writing perspectives? An essential question related to the history of invention is: What will our relationship to the past be? Scholars such as Crowley, Hawhee, and Kinneavy make arguments for a return to rhetorical studies as a means to invigorate and inform contemporary scholarship. How useful is this return? To what extent and what measure should a privileging of the old take place over re-inventions of classic concepts? The K-1 6 system has structured the concept of knowledge around Aristotelian ideals such as the atomization of knowledge and the separation of rhetoric and poetics. While Isocrates seems to have won out in most quarters—viewing writing as a site of invention—there is currently a strong pull toward the Platonic ideal—viewing writing as a tool to convey Truth found elsewhere. The Platonic ideal is entrenched within the standards movement as it works its way up through the secondary schools and into college and university classrooms. How does writing studies contend with the world-views this acts upon our students in unexamined ways as they view knowledge as an exercise in further and further compartrnentalization? How do we teach to the holistic activity of writing when our best methods seem to rely on differentiating writing by genre? This move seems especially reductive in light of the work done by Applebee in Literature and W, who makes the argument that divvying up knowledge according to genre is one of the least holistic ways to go about teaching. Another question along these lines is the differences between inventional approaches offered by the field of creative writing and the fields of English education and rhetoric/composition. Are they simply two different sites? Is a unified theory of the 237 writing process and writerly invention possible? Is it necessary or even useful? What are the sites of generative cross-over? What are the sites where they become distinct from one another? As argued convincingly by Crowley, Berlin, and Lauer, the historical placement of invention has implications for the state .of writing studies within the university setting. It is important to keep this historical perspective in mind as writing studies continues to adapt and evolve. For the fields of composition/rhetoric and English education, a primary concern is how to identify with a specific content area within an academic structure that favors the carving out of territory. This is an especially difficult concern because at their base, these fields’ abilities to draw from a variety of fields are a source of strength. For the field of creative writing, the question is, Why hasn’t creative writing struggled to discipline itself in the same manner as English education and composition/rhetoric? This question is not claiming that it should but, rather, opening the door to figuring out why and what that does for the field of creative writing. In addition, what can English education and rhetoric/composition learn fi'om the different ways that creative writing makes and accounts for knowledge? As an example, while creative writing seems to account for and utilize paradox, plurality, going on faith, and ambiguity, the fields of English education and rhetoric/ composition at various times accept these ineffable ways of knowing and producing (for example, in The Philosophy of Rhetoric Richards argues for ambiguity as the highest thought-process and Britton makes a claim for spontaneity) but overall these practices are not viewed as viable, sustainable places for invention within the existing scholarship. How can these ways of knowing—ways that elude traditional forms of assessment and identification—be practiced, researched and made more available to 238 students? While rhetoric/composition has done extensive work in terms of naming and identifying invention, invention practices and approaches within the fields of creative writing and English education often go unexamined. This dissertation undertakes the work of naming and identifying invention within creative writing but more work needs to be done in order to help further our understanding of invention. Why do studies on invention with actual writers, students or otherwise, dramatically fall into decline after the initial studies at the outset of the process movement circa 1971- 1981? Why are there few studies on the invention practices of successful writers? Wendy Bishop names this problem, “Even today, there are few studies of ‘creative writers’ and there is little encouragement to conduct such studies” (190), and I argue that studies concerned with the practices and approaches of successful creative writers is a rich and rewarding direction to turn for both the fields of English education and rhetoric and composition. 239 Appendix A Diane Wakoski, Interview transcript Interview conducted by Jason Wirtz on August 22, 2007 I’m interested in invention, specifically, writerly invention. So I thought maybe the first one (question) would be this idea... the logistics of invention...the nuts and bolts of invention for you. I have a quote here from an interview you gave in ’77 and you say, “I think, however, that most writers, unless they are rich, have to earn a living, and have constant demands on their time. If you have to have a certain block of time every day in order to write, you’re less likely to get it. ” So for me that kind of hinted at specific times in the day that you write, how you structure your life to write, so I was hoping you could talk about that, even if you use a computer or a pencil or just kind of the little things that... even if you don’t think those matter [interrupting] So you don’t want to start with invention. You don ’t think that deals with invention? Well that’s a good question. When you said invention I thought ok are we going to talk about experimental writing or the kind of experiments that poets think that their making, even if it’s not necessarily considered by other people, to be experimental writing. For instance, if you talk with someone who is a very abstract writer, which I don’t regard 240 myself to be, which is not to say there is no abstraction in my poems, but if you talk to someone like Robert Kelly who is a very abstract writer he might have a sense that if you used conventional narrative, which I frequently do, if you focused on some aspect of image which I frequently do, even if you regard metaphor as a non abstract proposition which I fiequently do, then you couldn’t be in any way considered an inventive, i.e., experimental writer. I guess for me the heart of talking about invention would be talking about what I think I do that’s magical or not thought of commonly by other people or not something that’s just a craft thing. That’s exactly where I’m headed. But you want to start with... No, no... if you have something that you think you do differently, something that’s like a heuristic that you don ’t see other people doing. I think that’s exactly what I’m after. Well the older I get the less I think that there’s anything new under the sun or anything that I could possibly do that someone hasn’t already done. Using that quotation from the interview with me instantly invokes the fact that in the last 20 years. I’ve had a sinecure, a real working job at MSU, but it means that I choose. . .that I don’t go to work fi'om nine to six, which I generally did when I was younger, and so I have the luxury of blocks of time and of choosing the place I’d like to work, the time I like to work, the way I’d like to work, etc. and the way I work now I could have never become a poet. I don’t like to get 241 up early. There’s no way I could be a William Stafford who go up at five o’clock in the morning so that I can write before I have to be at work at nine o’clock in the morning. There would have been no way for me to, regularly have that given my biorhythms. But now I feel that’s when I do my best writing. When I had my most punishing job working at the British book Center for the first few years I was in New York City in the 508 I did find a block of time so I am somebody that likes a block of time. I took a lunch hour, I just didn’t eat lunch, I took a lunch hour and walked over to the New York public Library across from the Museum of Modern Art and I made a beeline for the reference room and I knew I had to instantly be thinking of something and I discovered that if I opened Compton’s pictured Encyclopedia and opened it at random I would eventually find a picture that I could sit down and start writing about because I am visually stimulated. That ’sfascinating. So you so you’d start with an image. A visual image. Now I look out my window every day or I have beautifirl objects around me or whatever. But I didn’t have any of that so I found it in the library in a pictured Encyclopedia. It was not words that inspired me. I think that then leads me back to, what do you try to do in your poems that’s different, because when we use the term image in spite of [Ezra] Pound’s admonition to all of us that images are not visual pictures, that’s what most of us think of, and in fact because I am a very visually image oriented person and seeing things makes me write about them, and that’s from the very beginning of my writing. I think that what I try to do is invent something about that object that I’m looking at that is one unique to my way of thinking about it. And as I said, in retrospect, I don’t 242 think I have any unique ways people haven’t thought of, that seem like out of the ordinary of the clichés or stereotypes or even archetypes that everyone thinks about. So I try to see. There’s Emily Dickinson’s great word, she does own this word, “slant,” and it seems like a word that is almost numinous for a poet, because it’s not the journalist’s slant on things. But it’s that vision that takes you. You’re looking at the same thing everyone else is looking at, and it’s not just point of View, it’s the slant of it, and you in fact then use the visual object, not like a Rorschach test, and not exactly like a springboard to get you into the water, but you use it as, I don’t know, the beginning of a meander through a map or a landscape. So when you sense that sort of slant, that’s when you ’re recognizing that you ’ve got the material for poem? But then you need to work it to fruition? Well I may not get the slant until. . .again I have to talk about my early process which is very different, not very different, which is quantitatively different fiom my process now. I’ve always been somebody who can just sit down and write and I still do, but I think in the old days because of my limitation of time and just the fast hormonal way that life is raging through you when you’re young, that I was more likely to sit down and write, and I almost always wrote all whole draft of a poem, if something very emotional had stirred me to do it, and that was the reason that I had to invent the Compton’s pictured Encyclopedia ploy because I had to sit down and write even though nothing emotional was impacting me or I wouldn’t get anything written so I needed it to get me to that place where all of a sudden I have an emotional reaction—anger, hatred, tenderness, 243 sensuality—and these emotions start functioning and then I could write through that. And that’s where my poems have to come from, the writing doesn’t have to come from that but the poems have to come from that. I had to be inventive when I couldn’t just wait until I have something to say. I couldn’t just wait for inspiration or I might write one poem a year and that wasn’t in my acceptable realm. How is it difi‘erent now then, your approach? Well now first of all my life is so insulated, because I’ve finally become a great dreaded thing, the bourgeois person. And this is why it’s so hard to make poetry out of the bourgeois life, miless you make it into abstract or intellectual poetry is that you’re so insulated from the huge variation of emotion. You’re not hungry. You’re not exhausted. you are not full of the yeamings, you might yearn for love or affection, bourgeois poems. but even then you’re very likely to have a satisfied life with husbands wives children, you might even have good relations with your parents. I mean, the bourgeois life insulates you in the sense that it gives you so much that is satisfactory. And I think that we get back to the fact that all serious writing is about problem solving. If no other problem then why do we have to die. That is the one thing the bourgeois cannot influence you insulate you from, but in our society, we don’t have slavery unless you’re really are unlucky. You were born into a world of physical abuse and even then, if you look at the previous centuries and previous cultures. You don’t have people doing real torture to you. So, I think that again. The real challenge becomes, how can you invent the slant to solve a problem that everyone else thinks is either solved by material goods or good fortune or is 244 not worthy of the subject of poetry. So you have to keep inventing and inventing in such a way that you convince your reader who may not have the same experiences that you do. I think that it’s a sign of our culture that we only believe in things that people can document and so in the movies they have to say “based on a real story” because no one can believe these things really happened. We’ve lost our fictive imaginations, even though we read more fiction than we ever have and it’s more fictive than it’s ever been [laughter] but in poetry we always assume that poetry is based on a kind of heightened imagination that doesn’t vary from ones either autobiographical or emotionally autobiographical experiences so we still distrust the people writing about war who have never been in war. We still distrust the poet writing about the death of a beloved mother when her mother is not only not beloved but still alive [laughter]. It’s hard for us, so we have to keep inventing ways, not only to draw ourselves away fiom the stereotypes of our culture, but to convince the reader that this isn’t just ho-hum and I have already heard that before. Why should I care about the way you feel? Then of course language, as you know, is the way to beguile the reader into emotions and then we call that universal because “ oh, yes I experience that and I am willing to experience it through your words because they really are more interesting, more beautiful, more inventive than mine are.” So now I hear you talking a lot about the audience too, so that must be part of your invention process...conceptualizing the audience... how do you do that? I know Updike talks about writing to a housewife in Kentucky... 245 I’ve always. . .I think this started with that fact that I did start writing in high school at about the same time that I was becoming a speech major and participating in speech contests, forensics, oral interpretation. I was good at writing the speech but not the memorizing part. I think I instantly became aware of the fact that you have an audience. And then when I was writing poems, like most songwriters of the 508 and 60s, I would like to be able to sing my song or read my poem aloud so that I could use the orators or musician’s gift that I have of getting across to the audience but all of those things are audience oriented. How can I make the audience come to me? What can I put out there that will make them come in? That was a much harder concept for me in writing poetry than it was in writing speeches or in doing oral interpretation when I read other people’s writing aloud, performed it, and I think that I bypassed that step of the audience at an early stage of my writing, to come back to it later, but I bypassed it when I was introduced to the poetry in translation of Garcia Lorca. I think it’s interesting that Lorca was a musician, a performer, and what I was falling in love with was that gorgeous physical imagery that’s in the poems and the plays and then even in translation the sense that you could make music out of this physical material language and at that point I thought it would be no different, unless I was just completely lost in my head, to please myself and to please the audience. I think that our problem in the beginning is that we assume that if we please ourselves it will please the audience. I say I bypassed the audience because Lorca was doing something that seemed to transcend audience. It seemed to have some sort of intrinsic beauty. The combination of musical language and lyricism and the subject matter which was almost always about losing love or wanting something so much even though it wasn’t quite attainable. And of course that fit in with 246 themes of mine as well. And I think once I started just trying to work with what you would call imagery, at that point, then it was easier for me to then consider the audience in terms of “Okay, you’re going to come to me for this I hope because it’s musical and it’s beautiful, now I’ve got to get you to believe it in some way so then the content.” So in a funny way, I started with the opposite of form is an extension of content. I really started with content has to be an extension of form, but I wasn’t thinking of formal verse of course, I was thinking of the fact that if you’re going to do this there are some stories you can tell and some stories that you can’t tell. There are some emotions, if emotions can be content, that perhaps you can get across and some that won’t have much power. I think it started me on that course of inventing a way that you continually juggle form and content, which are the two big. . .the modernist problem: if we leave traditional prosody behind then what is the form and what is the function of the form and does form really follow function as form is an extension of content? Would you say that form is also the mother of invention in a way, the form dictates what it is you can do with a to see limitless opportunities then you need to learn the form so well. Do you think it changes when you switch form? I’ll quarrel with one word: form, now we are in a world where you can not learn form they are like Plato’s form in a sense of an idealized thing, but we can never see it sure was flexible, but it was still there now are form is in the early days I took trope for granted and it wasn’t after until maybe a decade of teaching that I really realized that a lot of people did not take trope for granted. And really if you are going to leave prosody out 247 of the issue then almost the only form you can have working for you is trope. And of course trope is a shape shifter too. . .it does take shapes. it shape shifts its way through the poem so that maybe there’s more than one true. Which maybe becomes the big trope where does trope that becomes the modern rendition of form in my world. It does and I realized that I still think poets like John Asberry honor the idea of the trope and work with, but I think it becomes then the post-Newtonian universe where Charles Olson talks about the field. But the field is always beyond what you can define it to be. And so I with a sort of old fashioned kind of trope and it’s really hard to talk about. [example] Your aesthetics with regard to trope tie directly into invention practices right? Because you are positioning yourself in such a way to produce something that you find fulfilling. Right. In one sense it makes me a good reader/observer of poetry because I can appreciate poetry that does not satisfy me. But I rarely let myself try to write a poem that wouldn’t satisfy me. And when I do I either put it in the discard heap to keep coming back to and keep trying to make satisfying [laughter]. And then I realized that I’m going to lose everything that was interesting about it or that was inventive about it in the first place, but one of the things I’ve discovered in reading a lot of new and fairly successful young writers is that either they’re more easily satisfied that I am and have less of a concept of audience that I think we ought to have or they regard poetry as a language game so if you can solve the problem than it is a satisfying poem. By my definitions that’s okay but it doesn’t satisfy me. I’d rather do my soduko puzzle [laughter], which by the way is like a trope because all the numbers have to fit in there. 248 So even this idea of the discard heap...so time is a type of invention heuristic right? So you are creating something and if you don ’t like it right away you put it away to look at it later. IWtat do you think happens in the interim, is there a subconscious process that is going on? In the interim, initially you are just refieshing your mind until you go back to it and you may bring to the poem things that have eroded or that you are just too tired to remember. In a longer period of time you may have developed a slightly different way—slant—of thinking about things and one of the things that can happen is that you can’t even think of why you would want to revise the poem so then it’s really trash although most of us are so egotistical that that almost never happens. So then you think, well what can you do? I looked at my first chapbook of poems, and another little anthology that I was in for young lady poets and I thought, you know, there are some poems in Coins and Coffins, that first chapbook, that I think a really good poems and even with my totally different mindset and totally different cells in my body so that sometimes I think I’m a totally different person I wouldn’t want to change. But others seemed to have problems, and one of them called Van Gogh Blue Picture, I decided I really could fix. I could make it a lot better. Wow, so this is years and years later. 249 It was published in 1962, and I wrote it in the fall of 1961. I wrote it the first month I was in New York City, and when I started revising it was two years ago, that would be 61 to 05, almost 50 years later, and I’ve read both versions of the poem and I’ve gone over them and what I find when you do that is that you can really sometimes make a better poem, but you’ll sometimes lose the raw emotional energy, that mysterious thing that’s really hard to put your finger on. We see that in our poetry classes where someone will fix a poem but it doesn’t have nearly the same emotional impact. Luis Gluck says the exact same thing. When she looked over her first books of poems she embarrassed by them and she found that when she went back to change them she lost what was there. It’s really there, because you’re striving for something different so the there is one poem that has never been published in any collection that I have. . .and never putting any of my collections because it never seemed good enough to me, although it seemed interesting and I thought while this is a poem that maybe I can really clean this up that poem was absolutely a writing snake. There was no way I can, and it down and get anything working for and I realized writing and in my early days I was not a great reviser. . .you know, I tinkered with things but I did not revise things the way I do now. And that’s one of the things that has truly changed with my so called bourgeois life where I have leisure blocks of time. So I’m not constantly lamenting over something really terrible and painful that happened to me, or angry because something is mean and unfair that happened to me. All these things that were driving me when I was young. So now, I think that all 250 these years of teaching poetry workshops have made me realize that there’ 8 almost no poem that you can’t tidy or clean up, and it makes me...it makes it very hard for me to read new books of poetry because almost everybody is too sloppy. So in your are of invention practices over time you ’ve become more focused on editing and tightening? Yes but it means that I still have to get a first draft. And this has been a great writing year for me. In January, I probably wrote a poem almost every day. I got up in the morning and had something new to write everyday and then tapered off, but I still have written a lot of poems this year. And I also got involved with my new big trope, the diamond dog, so I’ve been writing all my diamond dog poems. One of the things that I’ve realized is that now I go back to memories. For years I’ve used memories of very emotional events in my life, but I’ve used almost all of the big ones, more than once even, and I find myself satisfied with the way I’ve written about them so I don’t need to write them some more. And what in the last couple of years I’ve come back to, and this focuses on what I was originally talking to, my visual memory. Maybe this is a version of my Compton’s Encyclopedia, because now every morning when I sit down after I get up, well I get up at noon, but when I get up in the day I sit at my desk upstairs and look out the window onto division Street and there isn’t a lot to see. . .but one of the things that I see all during the leafy season is this big Norwegian maple out there with lots of leaves, and one morning I was sitting there and thinking about how leaves are always moving. And that really got me interested. . .I’ve always been afraid of trees, afi'aid of being in the woods. And I 251 thought oh that’s what bothers you, they’re like snake always moving. And so in winter, you’re not bothered by the trees, because they’re not hiding things anymore, because you’ve got these still skeletons in there and at the same time I remembered a very important time in my life was the three weeks I spent in Mallorca. I was teaching in their junior year abroad program. I have some visual memories from probably almost everything in my life, and one of my visual memories is walking into a little village on the island of Mallorca around fiesta time, so we Americans were the only ones walking around, and it was in the early autumn and the Linden trees still had all their leaves on them. And I just always have a visual memory, and 1 keep thinking nothing happened there why should I remember it? It had nothing to do with anything, I just remember the trees with leaves. I’ve seen millions of trees with leaves all my life. Why do I remember that? So I thought okay, that’s a good place to begin for a poetry investigation. And I went through quite a few versions of the poem until I discovered something that was real important. When I was in Spain, this is 1969, the guardia of Seville were everywhere. So there’s that military, and I’m always going back to my image of my father in the Navy, the military image that’s both enticing to me and forbidding to me and macho male, strong, but also leaves me out, and all those complications of feelings that I have and that I’ve used over and over in my poems. And I thought, okay, so I can have my father in this poem, its way to get the diamond dog into this poem, I can work with these leaves, and I’m really happy with this poem, but I went through and showed it to the Saphos [her poetry group] twice in the new alchemists [second poetry group, one I’m a part of] once. It went through lots of versions, and I finally got to the poem that I thought was just the quintessential poem and one of the things that working on this poem made me realize is 252 now that I’ve got this set time, or I try to do some writing every day. . .I always have that same View. So, it’s like my going to the Donnell Library when I was in New York, and having my less than an hour lunch break and going directly to the Compton’s Encyclopedia well that’s my library but this is Compton’s Encyclopedia and I have all these visual images that don’t mean anything but are just there with resonance. So now I can spin a poem out of them and it has to in some way start connecting with that slant, something that is my craziness that makes me write poetry, and I think that slant, to get back to your subject, is where our invention comes from. It’s part psychological it might be in that sense part of our personal mythology, it’s part autobiography, landscape, history, and it’s part of what. .. I think one of the things that I’ve always wanted to do in my poems is present to the world—there’s your audience—what they can’t see when they look at me or just listen to me talk. And that’s the slant, and that turns into the personal mythology of Diane or whoever’s the writer of the poem, and I think that’s where, if you can visualize the form in a Platonic sense, visualize it, that’s your slant, no one else will have quite that same version of it, but they will understand it. The trope makes it universal? Yes, if that’s the form. Another quote I have here, “Poetry is about controlling your life, control through words. We are reinventing the event on the page so that it can be controlled in a way we couldn’t 253 control it in our lives. ” which seems the same kind of thing you are talking about here, it’s related at least. That’s particularly for me involved with narrative because as you know there are many ways to tell a story and you need to keep retelling the stories that pain you or trouble you, and sometimes even the ones that please you, you need to keep reinventing them so that they finally are the way you want the world to see you—there’s your audience again. You know I was really fascinated. . .I’ve never read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood I was never interested in it and I truthfully wasn’t even interested in the Philip Seymour Hoffman movie but I did get interested in seeing the other film—unfortunately they were made in the same year so no one pays attention to it—the one called Infamous, which is basically trying to do the same thing and it made me. . .I got more interested, not in Truman Capote, but Perry, the one of the two murders who really. . .it was really important for him to talk to Truman Capote because he wanted his story told in a way that people would say, “I see why he did that.” He knew he couldn’t change the story but by slanting the story you can make people understand it. So you feel an identification with that impulse? Yes I think that’s one of the reasons that I picked the Medea story. . .I’ve never literally murdered anybody or anything but in my world the violence of giving up children for adoption, which I did, was the same as killing them even though what I thought I did was a good thing because they got better parents. I know now that I would have been a truly 254 tenible parent. And I love the idea of a heroin who understands that life isn’t valuable at any price. Slavery in the case of Medea, historically, Madea’s children would have gone into slavery because Jason remarries. . .Toni Morrison’s book. . .Rose kills her own child to escape slavery. I think it’s really important to be able to tell our stories as non- righteous stories, as non-moral stories, as stories that appreciate every human act unless it’s truly an act of monstrosity and even then I have a sympathy for their aesthetic which is that you have to at some point in order to really be an aesthetic being you have to abandon the morality and the ideas of monstrosity and so forth. Recognizing them as judgments, not inherent truths—the Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois debate. Right. And so to go back to the quotation we want to be in control of our lives, but most of us can’t be very much in control of our lives, and so we choose something that gives us a sense that mitigates the lack of control we have, in my case a way to tell my story that at least presents my slant. And you said you ’ve gone back to some of those more meaningful images fi'om your memory. The painfitl ones the positive ones and you find that you don’t write about those anymore, because you’ve done that is almost like an exorcism in some way 255 It can be, let me reverse that now and let me tell you about the diamond dog in the poem “The Father of my Country,” which you’ve probably heard me read. There is a little section in the poem, do you mind if I. . . [gets up to get binder fi'om her desk] in the father of my country does a little section. That’s based on, they say you don’t remember dreams very much. But I had a dream when I was a six or seven years old and I’ve remembered all my life that I’ve remembered my entire life [reads from Father of my Country:] of course, for me, the dog that was shaped like a diamond form the men and dogs go together years the dog representing that masculinity and following my father, who in my mind was leading me and abandoning it me. Well, I it’s a more important image to me. . . [Robert, her husband comes in] in one of the poems I wrote in January. I just alluded briefly to the diamond dogs, and it might have been because I really like tools. They are fairytale images for me, but as a person who has lots of jewelry. I have never liked diamonds, and I probably think that’s because of my anger about marriage and all that stuff from my teenage years. And so Boog in the new alchemist group said oh, that diamond dog is from the “father is my country” poem that I was sitting upstairs thinking. I’m going to do something with that diamond on fall, so I have this whole chapbook of diamond on poems, and it’s been so exciting to me because I think that’s what’s got me on this writing kick, because here I am with all my familiar material of motive and narrative resonance and it’s just very exciting. And so I said well, I’m going to put together a manuscript that I’ve written since 2000, when I had my last book published, and I’ll call it the diamond dog and I started writing more diamond dog poems and my newest challenge is: Can I put the diamond 256 dog in every single poem and the answer is no, I’m not sure that I should want to, but there are a lot of poems that maybe it needs a little work here a little work there and I think well, is there a place for the diamond dog to appear? So that’s almost an invention strategy right there It is, it is. When you find something like. . .when you find Medea, when you find the King of Spain, when you find any of those things they become ways of reinventing other things. This poem that uses the Spanish image of leaves, if I can find it [searching through binder], it wound up with the title, “A military daughter steels the pulsing of Linden leaves” [reads poem] it’s a combining of diflerent an actual event and a dream and it’s another one of those poems that we are all destined to write when we are older. After many years of writing, and it’s a poem that tells you where my poems come from yes, have you noticed that you consistently start to do that, where you actually write poetry about the act of writing poetry? Not as far as I’m concerned, I try not to, but I’m happy to if it’s a buried text because I think we enjoy those buried texts and as soon as I got the idea that those texts on the leaves are always looming and the temptation... 257 So that poem came from looking out the windows seen the leaves winking in the sun I thought about that for days before he did anything with it. And we did have an actual Linden tree on the verge in front of the house, but there are gas lines down there and it died. And I remembered then that we had a Linden tree, and that’s what those trees were in Spain. That was the connection: oh, we had a tree there once, mmm. . .Spain. . .It’s a mystery why the visual image stays in my mind. So this poem offers a psychological or mythological reason for it. Does it ofler the reason or a reason do you think? That leaves are warning, and it connected with my father, and men, power of the military, and the diamond dog which is precious but not mine. So you feel satisfied as though you found out why that image is stuck in your mind or did you think you just used that as a heuristic, an invention strategy to get you someplace? I know that I probably don’t need to write that image again, or use the image again. I have not finished with leaves, because I have not finished with why I am afraid of snakes, because I have refuse to accept Freud’s ideas that I’m an afiaid of the phallus, and I refuse to go to the common. . .everyone’s either afraid of snakes or spiders because it’s atomistic in our genes. It’s still something to meditate on. 258 this hits on a question that I ’ve had have...1 have been reading a decent number of interviews with writers and poets, and they talk about writing being an act of discovery verse writing as an act of presentation. So where does invention take place is it extra lingual, outside of the writing or is it while you’re writing that leads you into what it is you’re writing about, it doesn’t have to be a binary I suppose. well, you know from seeing enough beginning writers that everyone begins with writing as an act of presentation and when they say I can’t think of anything to write it’s because they have nothing to present to you and when they do have something to write it’s because they broke up with their girlfriend or they went on a trip and saw cherries on the tree for the first time or whatever, they have something to present to you. Fiction writers want to present characters and/or plot. . .fiction writers are more likely to have to work with having something to present. But poets, you say I feel like writing a poem, you have nothing to present and so then you have to use your inventiveness. And that’s something that most beginning writers don’t know how to access. I won’t say they don’t have it, I’ll say they don’t not access it. And in the life that I live right now I almost never any more have anything to present, but I began writing poetry because I needed to tell people my secret story. So I had a big thing to present and a big challenge, I couldn’t tell the story, I had to create an imaginative version of the story. so really, it can be both then, I know when I write 1 ’11 start with an idea or an image, most likely an image, but the first three pages of writing or malcing notes have nothing to 259 do with what the final poem will end up being. It’s a segue to get someplace else kind of like you loola'ng out the window as a segue to get to that memory which is a segue to get to the poem. I ’ll jot down ideas and one idea will lead to the next and to the next until all of a sudden I feel like I’ve got a slant or a poem or something here that have got to get out and render on the page. Do you get that sense that all of a sudden you’ve hit on something that is significant enough that can be a poem? When do you stop searching and start trying to render? Well, this isn’t an answer that I would have given you in the past, this is where I think it really helps to have a writing group, a workshop or a regular reader, because I think you’ll get to the end of what you think the poem is and whether you are satisfied or not satisfied you won’t keep doing anything because you feel like you’ve done it. If you don’t have anyone to be an audience, more than an audience, a critical audience then you can put it away for a month, for six months, a year and come back to it. Sometimes you have a flesh take on it but the chances are you won’t. I think the hard thing is finding a good critical audience. I feel I’ve created my own little monsters here: the Saphos and Alchemists and for awhile the Bourbon poets because I’ve taught them how to read poetry the way I want poetry to be read. I present my new poems to them and they still walk—not quite on eggshells—but they still do to an extent. IfI force them to they will tell me what really works and what really doesn’t work. Or if they just think the poem is perfect so they don’t want to talk about it anymore, or it’s wonderfirl or whatever. I quarrel with them, and that’s good, I will not quarrel with myself. Carrie Preston kept saying something about the Linden trees poem, “well, there’s just.” There’s a phrase in 260 there that Ruth Mallory, who is a really good careful reader said, “I just, it just doesn’t sound right to me” and I wrote her. We had a long e-mail correspondence about the word, however I was using it. And I finally battled her down to agree that it was ok, and it wasn’t until I put in a different place in the poem that she said “well of course now it makes sense. You were logically right, but it just didn’t feel right.” I have really smart people who argue with me until I have to do something that will satisfy them, or at least satisfy myself that I’ve done everything that I can do. I used to discount people who had writing groups because most of my life I not only had no writing groups but I had no one person who read my poems or responded to them. Editors pretty much left me on my own. That was in a period in my life when I didn’t revise poems. I don’t think my highly revised, really compact, dense poems are necessarily better than earlier poems that are unrevised and have more raw energy in them but I’m not at that place of raw energy. I have arthritis I can hardly walk [laughter]. So the bourgeois lifestyle helped you become a better critic but hurt you in terms of raw energy. Yes. And it worked fine in my life. I used the raw energy when I had it and then I evolved into something else. People often ask me how my poetry has changed as a result of teaching, and I’ll say for years that it did not change at all. But in the last decade, the result of being a really close reader, a critical reader of poems, and having to go into a beginning class with the notion that even the crappiest thing could be made better by some kind of revision has made me really interested in that process and I have a form to 261 work with: the idea of trope. Now I have two groups of readers who read the way I’ve taught them to read so they can be the brain, the part of my brain that I trust that is outside of my actual brain. I might not trust them if I didn’t think they shared my critical values. Then I would say, ok your point of view is something, but I’m not going to change my poem because of that. So you need to find a reader with your same aesthetic? Yes. And it can become even more than your aesthetics—your poetics. Because you can share aesthetics but not share poetics, and you change your poem not for aesthetic reasons but for reasons of poetics which is form. If Ruth Mallory says, “That doesn’t sound right to me” she could either mean that aesthetically but she could also mean it poetically. Well I argue that it aesthetically in terms of a phrase that is rich and has multiple meanings, you know, I gave her a long argument of language and she said, “Well, I can’t argue with that.” Poetics is finally the answer. It was in the wrong place. But there was no place for it in the poem as it was formed at that time. When I reformed it I moved the image of the leaves and my fear of snakes down to the revelation which had been buried. Everyone said that’s beautiful. I had to move it down there finally and no one had suggested that, I had to figure that out on my own as a result of battling with Ruth and agreeint that something was wrong. But it wasn’t the phrase that made me move things around. She currently has a husband whose a jet pilot anorak that fits in with the father and the Guardian Seville in the menace that there not be the menace by being there, but he’s a menace by being gone. I think that is one of the things that interested me 262 enough to keep that memory in my mind. But I don’t have any pictures of Guardian Seville in my mind of that snapshot of the Plaza in that somnolent afternoon. That is interesting as an invention strategy. It’s like Rosebud almost you know? Exactly. So revision is wedded very closely to invention then? Yes 1:12:32 So when you are revising how do you see that as being tied to invention. I started doing this strange thing was taking your class that I would place a poem in my back pocket and eventually it would fall out of my back pocket and I would pick it up and find it and read it as though someone else had written it and in reading that way I tried to separate the editor and the creator to get a distance to see things in a new way. Does revision work like that for you where you are trying to see something in a new way? Or is it really a reinvention of something? [long pause] It means you have to discover something that was missing or that was buried and reformat it, to use a technological term, or reformulate it or create a new form and here’s where...for instance again, I guess my theme today is reversing form as an extension of content which has been my mantra for years into saying that 'content is an 263 extension of form. . .once I was able, I will stick with the example of the Linden trees poem, once I realized that I needed the menacing image of the rustling trees and I’m proud of the fact that I never use the word rustle in the poem, that was the first conscious act of invention. The constantly moving leaves became the image of the snake of temptation fi'om Paradise. And then connects with my father. . .and one of the reasons. . .I just used an old fashion rule that if everybody likes it then maybe it should be at the beginning or the end because those are the two places where you entice people. I tried it at the beginning and I thought that I wasted it, and it was buried in the middle, what about the ending? Well once I started doing that, then the image of the leaves becomes an image of warning, it becomes the temptation that you are warned against. I think that I like to pair invention with discovery, invention implies that you make it up, discovery implies that you find it already there but with a new value, that it’s been hidden or hidden in plain sight and not valued, but it seems to me that invention can be discovery and by the same token discovery...you can use discovery as a way to invent, to make something new that has not been there before, so you discover something and then you invent it into something else, or you find a different value for it rather than just discovering its value. You don’t really invent something new, you feel more like you’re discovering something new that’s always been there. And if we take the ancient adage of nothing new under the sun. Then we are never really inventing we are always discovering. But I think that as writers we are discovering 264 something and putting it together in a way that someone else possibly. . .even if they discovered those same things they might not invent them into what we invent them. I know Stewart Dybek talked about juxtaposition to throw two difi"erent things together and then all of a sudden you have something entirely diflerent and Stephen King talks about writing as a found object. Almost as if they were already there. I believe Mozart talked about music that way. So do you feel that there is almost that there is an ideal poem that exists that you are trying to find ? Well I do believe that there have been ideal poems that I have discovered along the way—not that I’ve written them—that other people have written and that I'm always trying to find a way to reinvent those poems as my own. I say I could never write Wallace Stevens “Snowman” or I could never write DH Lawrence's “Snake” or I could never writes William Butler Yeats’ ballad about wandering Angus or the second coming. On and on is the list of things I couldn't write but in some way I'm always trying to reinvent perhaps one of those great poems. In some way. So modeling becomes an act of invention? It's different from modeling. I hate to use the word like deconstructing, but it's taking the model apart and putting it together in a different way. Sometimes that just means plugging, (I hate using these technical terms) plugging your mythology into the poem instead of Wallace Stevens’ or Yeats’, but most people wouldn't recognize the poems that 265 you see as reinventions of some great poem, as such. You might not even recognize that. Sometimes actually a good critic will say “oh my goodness, so-and-so seems to be reinventing Coleridge’s is Kubla-Khan” or whatever. I think that, you know Pound really was a genius. Even though we don't necessarily love his poetry, or his politics. But when he said make it new. In a sense that said everything there is nothing new, but you have to take it and make it new. And the making part is invention, and the new part is discovery right? The problem with making it to new is that no one will recognize it and has to have some of that universal or archetypal or recognition factor or quality. The things that we think of that we really love that we think are new are probably reinventions yes, they 've all got their antecedents right? When you talk about are tight and universal. Do you think there 's some sort of collective unconscious has got to be something that the idea that the stories of already been told that poets try to tie into the becomes recognizable and acceptable and are using that personal mythology as a sort of way to invent a great poems. Reader awareness I don't disbelieve in the concept of a collective unconscious. I don't really know any of the arguments for or against it, but since I do believe that there are things such as archetypes ends. They don't, the bare bones of than the skeletons of them don't alter fi'om culture to culture or century to century. I would like to thank that argument, you know Young's argument is a good one than the science fiction writer in me says. What if there is an entire civilization on another planet somewhere we cannot even conceive of the model of it would be. Then I suppose you could say you could still make the argument 266 that the collective unconscious is common to the human species. And whatever this other species would have their own collective unconscious, because it seems like if you're going to have a collective unconscious. That's made up of all these archetypes that Saudi civilizations are built, because you always have this foundation of these basic things that everybody shares and believes in. So, as long as you have things that people share and believe in than you can have a civilization. If absolutely everybody had a totally different model, you couldn't have civilization, and therefore couldn't build up to Michelangelo or Yeats or Mozart it's interesting to me that you sake that he goes so personal in your poetry to get at such universals. And that's the way you can see their right to universals are found in the details? If you try to work with just universals for most writers. It means your only working in generalizations. I guess is that we need a model for our abstractions. Now this is not true of abstract writers, which is why none of them are my really most favorite writers. Even though I like and admire, because it seems like they're not while they're not writing in clichés in generalizations. They also are writing. Perhaps about universals in ways that I can not connect to because I need the lower set of specifics to make me more fully understand that poets slants so they're not really giving you an access point? 267 They are not giving me an access point, because that's the way I think, but I think they are giving other people, other kinds of access points aspects access points that I don't use my own poetry what about this idea, I know you've talked about dreams before, and doing what the subconscious had you think that plays out in your invention and writing practice? What dreams used to be very important to me, I’m an old-time Freudian so for years I would think about dreams at various times try to write them down. I'm always when I first started doing that and started realizing how boring dreams are the most people will I thought then this is what poetry needs to be the opponent needs to feel when you read it have that same kind of excitement that you feel after you wake up from a dream that's erotic sensuous. It's compelling and gives you an image why was that person. My lawyer in a dream or whatever in my train some odd fact of displacement. You want the poem anyone's poem to affect you in the way your best dreams affect you. And so I finally decided that the importance of dreams for poets. Is that it gives us a model, you know, there is what we want to present. We want to present that affect the affect of the dream, and it's rare to find dream content like my diamond dog that continues to interest you use a dreamer yes, dreams are notorious for people to 268 subconscious on poems have subtexts already has subtexts, and I suppose all good writing has subtexts, because if things don't connect enough underneath to be a subtexts than what's out there is not given a complete an interesting sense. And it's not going to have any depth, and what we're interested in about the subconscious is the ways he invisibly makes us act in our conscious lives in so what were interested in the subtext of the poems is the way to invisibly makes the poem act on the surface. And sometimes that's really what's wrong with the poem. It's either not connecting with its subtext or it doesn't have a subtext because, you know, how can we know our subconscious? Well, theoretically through dreams, through some other access than the conscious world. So subtext in writing is a metaphorical representation of the subconscious in living? It seems like a metaphor that would work. Maybe there's some flaws in it but for the moment I can't think of any. I've read a lot of writers who talk about the subconscious being...Rollo May has an article about this too but thinking about something for so long consciously and then all of a sudden an understanding comes to you so your subconscious mind has been working through it. Do you get a sense that that’s a tool that you also utilize? Well you know again to go back to this Linden trees poem, I have asked myself for years, because one of the things I do when I sit down to write a poem if I don't have a specific thing to present or something that's happened to me, you know, I scroll through my 269 scrapbooks of visual images which are infinite. And this is an image which comes back to me frequently. I keep asking myself why. Is this just at the top of the page? Did something happen and I don't remember? I think the answer is no. Did you connect it with something else? Well, probably many things over the years about trees, but maybe not about trees, maybe about the movement, not even leaves but that constant movement that they represent. Why is that constantly visually there as trees? I think that in that sense the subconscious can be a locator of possible poem material. In all fairness I wouldn't have started working with it had I not been sitting there at that window in March seeing all the trees green-leaved. So you needed that cue? I definitely needed a cue, but I don't need the queue to scroll that image of the hot summer afternoon plaza with the green tree leaves in Spain. You just don 't know the reason why, the subconscious throws it on the screen for you to try to figure out why. And I think maybe it throws it on the screen to give you a chance to make connections, not because it intrinsically means something, but that it's something you could use. Maybe it's a, what shall I say, a challenge-free image, you know it doesn't invoke any particular feelings in you so maybe it's like a save screen, something that's easy to put on there because it doesn't invoke anything. 270 And then through the process of writing you figure that out... ...well since you can’t write poems about nothing. I think what we finally get back to is, if you don't have anything you want to say then why do you want to write poems? That's right back to what I've been teaching all these years. Poems are not messages, poems are intrinsic beings, and for some reason you're in love with making them. I notice when you talked about the poem that you wrote in the Fall of 60 or 61 and other poems you talk about them as definitely more than just words on a page, you identify them like a relationship. Oh, yeah. So that ties in with invention because you have to have that sort of conception of a poem in order to write it. Yes, you create them. It’s a cliched metaphor but things that writers write are their children. People often ask me what my favorite poem is. I tell them what my ten best are but like a parent I don’t have a favorite child. 271 So does this not take place when you are thinking of academic writing? Is academic writing a completely different invention process? When you switch genres, you are no longer writing a poem but a... ...critical article. Since I’m definitely not a scholar and the most criticism I’ve ever written is little articles here and there that are mostly book reviews. I think I’m a good critic. I honed that skill teaching poetry writing and feeling as though it was my obligation to critique people’s poems. I know lots of creative writing teachers don’t feel that is their obligation but I do. I actually enjoy doing it and it’s a way of finding order in somebody else’s writing and it is an act of invention because sometimes you find things—here we go to subtext or subconscious—that the poets themselves didn’t know were there and it doesn’t matter if they do or they don’t but they add to the way other people can read the poems. I do think the primary task of a critic is to work with good writing and to show people how much better than they might think it is that it actually is. I don’t think you should have to write a criticism or a book review of a piece of writing that you consider bad. Flawed? Fine. Because that’s just like a workshop. And I feel sorry when things get in print that you have to talk more about their flaws. But then there are a lot of bad critics who find flaws where there are none. The Times assigned an improbable but well known person to review the Harry Potter books. All of the objections that he has are made by somebody who doesn’t understand what’s going on. So he’s reading it with a completely diflerent set of aesthetics then? 0r holding it to a standard that it’s not trying to achieve. 272 He’s just wrong about things. Not facts, but ways of looking at things. He’s an improper person to be reviewing that book. He’s not someone schooled in myth and fantasy and writing about magic. He’s just not educated enough to write it so it was a stupid review. This is something completely off your subject but it seems to me that the biggest problem that all of us who lead a literary life is having to accept the fact that great numbers of people who are not competent to be either published writers or published critics are constantly allowed to do those things and sometimes admired by equally ignorant people. And there doesn’t seem to be any good-natured way to get rid of that. I don’t know the answer. The way you think about poetry as such a part of yourself—especially if you consider your poems your children—then that approach puts you into a position to do the best work you can do. Do you take that stance with other types of writing besides poetry? Yes. With my prose I am really happy to have a smart editor—there is nothing worse than having a dumb editor. I have never been somebody who has let an editor or the editor’s editor to change my poems but whenever I write critical articles if] have a really good editor like Stephen Cory in Atlanta than I will listen. He really helped me revise in ways that might seem small but were really essential and I could quarrel with him ifI felt he was wrong but he was immensely helpful. He just tightened up my prose and made it a better article and it’s really a good article. I had an editor like that at the Women’s Review of Books when I was writing an article for them. I’m a despot about my poetry 273 but I’m not a despot about my prose. However, I’m only a despot after I’ve gotten to this stage and I do submit myself to these groups of people who work with me and I’ll argue violently with them sometimes and they usually fight right back. In almost all cases they are right that something isn’t working. They are often not right about why it is because none of us are as good at figuring out why something isn’t working but they’re pretty good about their reasons too. The only thing a critic can’t tell you is how to fix it. You still have to write it. I’ve also heard this argument—Hemingway was famous for this—that some parts of your writing, if you figure it out, you can ruin it. You actually said in class once, “This is why poets should never explain their poems, because they lose their magic. ” Are there risks involved in making your writing process too conscious? Are there some things that are bad to learn if you want to be a good writer? I think that one of the bad side-effects of being too conscious in poetry is to become overly explanatory, explanation just wrecks a poem. I often have to go through, these days, several version of a poem because I’ve been. . .if you don’t trust your trope, if it seems to invisible, then you keep explaining it because you can’t trust your audience if you can’t trust your own trope or tropes. That’s one side-effect that can be negative. On the other hand it can be combated by just going through and asking even an outsider if this is too explanatory and where it is burdened down by explanation. There are probably other bad effects but that’s the main one that I’ve seen. I suppose there is the opposite, because opposites are always true, if you are too conscious about how the intricacy of 274 your trope is working it may be working that way intricately but the more intricate it is the more subtle it is and then you assume that other people are going to see it. In the long run, that’s not a bad mistake to make, it’s just something that will make you a writer with less readers or without any readers in your own time. Sometimes it can make you so subtle that you are almost mute in which case then you should ask yourself, do you really want to be talking to yourself? Being too obscure, being overly explanatory. Well I’m not talking about being obscure because obscure in my opinion is always bad. But being too subtle—and how can you be too obscure in a poem which is an exercise in subtlety?——well, the answer is that if you don’t even have one visible clue on the surface then. . .if all your clues are intricately intertwined with something else then you may just be writing yourself out of an audience. Every once in while I explain something in my poem and I think I’m really smart and witty and some Sappho or New Alchemist will just smile and say, “Yeah, we don’t get it” [laughter] and the smart ones will argue a point and as soon as I have to argue a point then I’ll see that maybe I really didn’t do on the surface what I had to do. Because even if they argue for you they might be arguing a diflerent point than you were trying to make. 275 Yes. You can either explain yourself too much or be too subtle as a result of being very conscious of what you are doing. That’s another quote I have you saying, “T 00 much of a message, we need ambiguity for a poem to work. ” Yes, because that gives you multiple readers and sometimes very different multiple readers. You want people to be able to read. . .this is why I don’t go for political poems because it’s hard to be ambiguous about political things and I just think that you’re better off writing a polemical article than a polemical poem although there are polemical poems that succeed with limited lives but they have lives. What about what you feel in terms of invention if you think about how you are not going to do something unless you are rewarded for it. So a good reward is going to make you do it again. In writing your poems, then, what do you feel they give back to you that keep fueling you to want to go back and write more poetry? That’s a great question because it’s probably unanswerable [laughter]. It’s still a great question. One of the things I’ve talked about earlier is that writing a poem that you feel is successful makes you feel in control of either the idea that you are talking about or the experience that you are relating or the emotions that you are feeling and that’s a very rewarding human experience to feel in control of something. I sometimes feel like the only—certainly when I was young—I felt like the only thing that made me feel in control 276 of my life was a poem. So it had a huge, huge feedback for me. Now, living the bourgeois life, having enough money in my retirement fund, not having to be in a place where there is no medical healthcare, not yet being so overweight that I can’t continue to enjoy all the wonderful food that’s available, having a nice loving husband, not yet having to suffer from somebody’s death or my own long ill-health or something like that, you know there are lots more things that I think I have control over. But when I think about it I know I don’t have control over those things. Robert could be gone tomorrow, my health could be gone tomorrow, my money could be gone tomorrow. All kinds of things could be gone so the control that I feel in my poems. . .how can that be gone? That can never be gone? You’re certainly not slowing down in the writing either right? Even if no one else reads them except my Alchemists and Sapphos. Just having been in print as much as I have at least during my lifetime even if I’m totally out of fashion which I’m pretty much there now, there’s still people that read my poetry and like it. Why do I need to write new poems when there’s such a diminishing audience? Because each time I do it I reassert myself on that world and it just makes me feel so happy, I love it, it’s the greatest drug in the world. Does publication add or not even matter? Does it validate in any way? It adds. It adds something different. It’s always most important to be centered in yourself. In one sense, you need nothing outside of yourself to be centered in yourself. But to be 277 centered in the worlds you need an audience and you need an outside and you need an other so it makes me happier when the poem is accepted for publication or the book is out there. Of course I have that subsidiary satisfaction of accumulated wealth of having published all of my life so in one sense I don’t have to keep doing it but if I’m only centered in myself and I continue to write these poems and feel empowered and pleasured by them then it’s still kind of lonely. There’s no outside response. So yes, you need it. I don’t need it as much as I used to, partly because I’ve gotten a lot of it in my lifetime and I think this is a truism about aging, that as we get older we really care less about other people. We’re much more inside of ourselves and our heads and I don’t know what it has to do with, maybe it has to do with this accumulation of your life, maybe it really is what some people say that you’re beginning to think about death and non-life so you are just inside yourself and getting ready to leave the world behind so it’s less important to you. For me, it will probably never stop being important. And these identities and approaches to life then reflect in the writing that you do. One of my ideas is that writerly identity is tied directly to invention. So how you conceive of yourself is a heuristic in a way that helps you formulate poetry, formulate anything creative. Yes, I agree. So do you see your approach then, your writerly identity, as having changed over time? 278 Not dramatically, but gradually. So then you see those same shift in your writing? Yes. So your identity and your approach to the world directly connects to the changes in your writing as it evolves over time? Yes. I think that one of the things that makes you interested in continuing to write poems, aside from what we’ve been talking about, is purely egotistical in that it’s really interesting, egotistically, to observe what of the younger you is still there and what of the mature you has been added to it and/or whether that’s replaced—this is purely egotistically and it’s what anybody whether he’s the world’s most terrible writer or an accomplished writer could be involved with. That’s interesting. So you notice all of a sudden maybe you have a diflerent inclination towards something and realize “ok that’s not who I used to be, that’s something else. ” And you notice yourself in poems paying attention to things that you no longer pay attention to in your life but originally you paid attention to them in your poetry because you paid attention to them in your life. 279 So the subject matter changes... Well it does change. I still have a motif of lost love or being rejected by someone or something worthy and that in the Freudian sense will be there—that of the lost father. But I don’t have nearly as many of those poems that come out of “here’s a new rejection, here’s a new person to write about.” I’ve started doing another kind of invention that again starts with looking for a poem to write so I call up one of my scrapbook images and this one is an image of. . .and this one does have an emotional connotation for me. When we were at the Vermont writer’s center Robert and I were in the tavern near the center one night as we usually were and sitting there and I saw in the doorway, in the screen door, what I was sure what Galway Kinnell and he looked in and then all of a sudden saw me and went away. Well that keys into Diane’s rejection [laughter]. Over the years it has occurred to me that I made it up, that it was someone just looking in the door, I have terrible eyesight anyway. It could be a million explanations but it’s always something I scroll past, I never wrote about it. I didn’t think I was going to write about it and I didn’t. In the first draft of my poem about a face that looked like a hatchet and I was thinking of Galway’s face which is broad and flat that was stuck like the blade of an axe in the doorway. Well it drove everybody crazy, and the first version was the best, and it wasn’t until I really started working out what I was trying to do, and I still don’t think I’m there, but that one drove me crazy and it came from that image. And I didn’t want to write about Galway Kinnell and then I wrote a real explanatory version and it was awful but, you know, it was getting me someplace. I think what I have started doing is, in the same way that I have the scrapbook of images like the afternoon plaza in Spain with the Linden 280 trees, I have images of emotional fi'ozen moments with people. I tried to write one that was pretty successful, and image of George Oppen talking to me on the street one day which is also about my poetic. Then the poem I tried to write this week since I had nothing and we were having a Sappho meeting I. . .one of the things that flashed through my mind is how hard it is for me to be with people in social situations because I have nothing to say. Usually it’s easier for me to be with them if they talk a lot but every once in a while there is someone who talks a lot and you just realize that you can’t stand anything they are saying so I invented a whole situation about having a conversation with someone you hate and it still isn’t working one-hundred percent but I had the great inspiration of mentioning Cannelites—the order of nuns that take a vow of silence—so now I have something to aim for, wishing that the whole world were Cannelites [laughter]. But to me it’s very new to begin writing these poems out of half. . .it would be more likely for me to invent a poem out of fantasy than take these half-baked situations that, as far as I’m concerned, have nothing to do with poetry. I’m not a satirical poet so why would I want to write a poem about how awful it is to be at a dinner table with a boring person sitting next to you talking? But I now find reasons to try and invent them into something different, or something that I haven’t tried before. My last question is a little bit dijferentfiom invention but I think they are related. It ’s the of naive question of can writing be taught? Can you teach someone to be a poet? A long and involved answer would be yes and a short answer would be you can’t teach them to be a good poet. You can teach them to be a better writer. You can teach grarmnar 281 which is really important, and vocabulary, and make them aware of the fact that they need to read books and have information, and you can show them some great poems and then you can critique their own efforts for grammar, for vocabulary, for paucity of information, or generalizations, and suggest that maybe there’s a poet that they might like to read who’s tacked some of these things. But will they learn them? If they have some kind of aptitude for language and are really interested in poetry as an art form then yes, they will. But there are people with aptitudes for language who really rebel against the kinds of things that poetry does and so I don’t think you can teach them to be poets because they don’t want to be. If you said, “Well what if they want to be?” Well, what if I had a crippled leg and I wanted it not to be crippled? I probably couldn’t do anything about it. If they don’t want to be poets then they don’t want to be poets and I don’t believe in brainwashing. I think that my one experience is that you can make anyone who writes and is willing to do the same amount of work that they would do in a math class into a better writer. Can you make them think like a poet? Well, thinking like a poet means thinking metaphorically and that means being interested in abstract things that are explained by concrete things and finding unusual and beautiful language. I don’t know why you couldn’t help them improve what they’re doing. But you think the best poets, they had some sort of intrinsic motivation first of all and then something in them was more of a genius type of thing? 282 I and my generation believe in something called talent although I don’t necessarily think you can test for it. That’s what my generation believed. I think it’s also combined with other things. I do know that I was talented at playing the piano when I was a child and I was talented at writing in my classes but when I got to college I didn’t have the right background and I had lots of other psychological problems that made it very unlikely for me to be a musician but whenever I wrote anything peOple would say “Oh” and stop and listen so I think I had some sort of talent for it. I also developed that talent and with music I didn’t really develop that talent and since I still have never won a Pulitzer prize I can’t say that I was one of the greatly talented poets of my generation [laughter] but I had a lot of talent. Do you think of that as an indicator or are you just kidding about the Pulitzer? Oh no, that’s always been my greatest desire in life—to win a Pulitzer. Even though I now don’t think I will—I used to think I would—it still would be the thing to make me the happiest in the world besides living to be a hundred and not be in poor health, and even then it might make me happier than that. Even though I know that absolutely retched people win Pulitzer prizes. It’s been my one really worldly goal. Regardless of its intrinsic value it has been something I have wanted in my life and have not gotten. When I see people in beginning classes they are people who have truly bad educations and people who have better educations and sometimes the person with truly bad education has more talent for writing poetry than the person with the good education so there is something to this talent thing. I’m not saying it’s immeasurable, I’m just 283 saying right now we don’t have good measures for it. If you combine talent with education then there is one more ingredient and you know what that is, you have to want to do it. And lots of talented people are multi-talented and lots of well educated people are educated in various things and sometimes they lack the desire to do even one of those things, at least in a primary way. They spread themselves too thin. Right, or there isn’t one thing that really means a lot. You can go a long way in this world on obsession. To really need or want to do one thing. It’s a whole lot better if you’re talented at it and have the opportunity to be educated in doing it but you can go a long way on pure desire and obsession. I think that one of the things—I know you are thinking about this in terms of pedagogy—that one of the things that we encounter in our classes with poetry is that it’s not highly valued in our culture. I sort of like that because that leads us off into this quiet, hermit-like world where I can have it and I don’t have to be battling with a thousand idiots but, in all fairness, it’s a problem. You have to keep making arguments about why you should have classes, why you should hire people to teach it, why these classes should be small when other people have big classes. My only answer to that is one you’ve heard me say in class before that poetry is part of Western civilization, and for that matter Asian and other civilizations as well, and it doesn’t seem meaningful to me that we could have an education without at least a gesture toward that historically important thing. I think that we’re in serious trouble in any of our ventures in 284 life if the only argument for a thing is its popularity or the need of a big group of people desiring to do it. Have you seen the university play a much dijfkrent role in creating and housing creative writers ? The university has been very good to the world of poetry in the last fifty years. I understand that universities are totally different entities these days. They’re run by CEOs, they’re run for masses of people, the idea of education is vocational even if the vocation is professional such as medicine or law or engineering and things that have invisible values—the arts in general—are hard to make a pitch for in a CEO-run world. I still think the way to make the pitch, and this runs into another problem, we’re also supposedly anti-elite organizations now but I still think the pitch is for the elite and that is that a few people need to know these things. A few people need to know ancient Greek and how to read Hieroglyphics and medieval history and poetry and that’s what universities are for and libraries. 1 think that’s the pitch you have to make. I would even make the pitch that you become a pretty crass and callous person whether you are a doctor or a business executive if you don’t have some of these more esoteric and beautiful and frner things floating around in your head. They are there to offer a little sustenance to people who are hungry for them. 285 Appendix B Bill Olsen, Interview transcript Interview conducted by Jason Wirtz on April 11, 2008 Take me through a successful day of writing for you. What does that look like? 1 can’t first of all say that all days are successful. I would say on a typical day I get up and I read first—and I don’t read favorites—>1 read work that’s unknown to me. There are a couple advantages of that for me. In the morning my mind is a tabula rasa, it’s a blackboard without any words written on it, and for me to enter the linguistic realm, the creative realm of poetry, I have to hear the language, I have to find my way into that language and not only that, find my way into a language build around perceptual activity as opposed to informational activity like a newspaper or even strictly intellectual activity. I have to be in that zone for a while. I keep a journal by me while I’m reading and the instant something occurs to me I write it down and after I have a page or two of notes I get impatient. This creative impatience sends me to the computer and I try to bang away at something. Are these random, unrelated notes or notes that cluster around a common theme? I use as much of the notes as possible. It’s a form of conservation. In other words I don’t generate a lot. I use quite of bit of my notes. They’re lines, they’re not prospectus notes 286 towards a poem, although occasionally I will write down titles and things like that, these are lines of poetry and phrases. Although I used to, I no longer begin with subject matter. Then it’s more about the words and the language than the subject? I. would say so although I am more sympathetic to a poetry that doesn’t abscond fiom subject matter. Unless the language of the poem takes over the poem doesn’t move—it has no motion—and therefore it has no emotion. I want poetry to help me, as Stevens said, to help me with my life. Even if it’s poetry of humor I want it to take itself seriously because it helps me with my life and the only way for that to happen in humor, poetry, or art—and it doesn’t matter if it’s abstract, nonrepresentational, nonlinear or any of that stuff—is for it to contend with human realities. Does the language then get you into the subject matter? Normally I would say that’s true. Most frequently I’m sitting reading a book writing down lines that occur to me and that sends me to the computer. A sort of critical mass? I guess. That’s a good way of thinking about it. When you sit down to read do you do so with the intention of generating lines of poetry? 287 Yes. Are there other times when you read without reading for ideas? I don’t read poetry at night because it has an over stimulating effect on me, in other words it may start me writing. I read nonfiction at night, when school isn’t overwhelming my time, because reading poetry at night would be like drinking a cup of coffee immediately before attempting sleep. How has your inventional approach changed over time? When I was younger in my writing I would take on projects. This week I’d say I’ll read Frost and Lowell and I’ll write seven sonnets: one a day. I would establish myself assignments. Or I would say today I read Two Citizens by James Rice and try to write an apprentice poem. I was more given then to giving myself overt assignments. How did that change? I’ve read and written a lot. Poetry is an act of making as well as an act of seeing, in other words, it requires craft and one has to learn one’s craft. You don’t want to sit on a two- legged chair. I gave myself to learning that craft. And now I can rely more on intuition. Which is a common theme I’ve heard—that idea of learning craft in order to forget it. 288 That’s probably true. There’s a Charlie Mingus documentary where he’s just goofing on the piano for his granddaughter, drinking a big bottle of red wine in the meantime and he’s playing brilliant stuff and he’s not thinking about it but what it’s expressing is years and years of dedication and discipline. What that free-form improvisation is expressing is discipline. And in the end we value the freedom of it. What do you do when you revise? I know this is a huge question. Good question. I look for incompetence for one thing. And places where I wasn’t making connections, I was going on rhetoric, but I wasn’t really making perceptual connections, they weren’t there. There are times when I think the poems are unfinished because they are sentimental, they go for easy closure or they, as Stevens put it, ‘they fail for feeling’. I hear them out loud and all that technical stuff matters of course. Trying to listen the poem forward is actually a useful device in revision. Listen the poem forward? Yes, you might have a word appear in a poem, let’s say ‘mock,’ and it’s just a placeholder and you think: ‘I put that word there because the sound of the word is right ' but I hadn’t found the right word so then you play around. . .ok what word sounds like mock? Maybe it’s clock? Maybe it’s block?’ You have heard the poem forward to begin with and this is a continuing of trying to hear the poem forward. Trying to listen. 289 This is a lyrical approach as opposed to a content approach, or are you trying to wed the two together, trying to find a word that fits the lyric and the meaning? If it doesn’t sound good it probably has no meaning and if it has no meaning it probably doesn’t sound good. Yes, bringing the two worlds together but in the experience of revision it doesn’t feel so directional. Sometimes revising is great and sometimes it’s not. One must learn to make one’s dissatisfactions creative dissatisfactions. The dissatisfaction that anyone who writes poetry feels on a given day looking at one’s poems thinking, ‘These are lousy,” (and this experience happens, say, right before you give a reading) that dissatisfaction is actually a source of creativity. It brings you back to the work, it brings the work into focus if you can channel it right and you don’t direct it toward self-loathing. You direct it out toward the act of makingwhich is healthy. That is the therapy behind writing poetry, the making of it. Being dissatisfied is a place for the energy to come to go back and revise and that ’s where you feel the tension that something is of and it gives you the space to try to make it better. Absolutely, and in my case, since I am an incessant reviser] consider the line between the first draft and revision to be less and less discemable. I like going back to those spaces because they are spaces. A verbal construct creates something special. It’s a place to inhabit and it’s a safe place no matter what you’re writing about—it could be the 290 Roman Coliseum—and I value that so much that I have to ultimately disconnect from the safety of the place and let the poem go. Still speaking to the idea of revision, this idea of separating the creator from the editor, is this a useful construct for you? I teach and I’m an editor so I can and do edit other people’s work with an editorial eye, an eye toward good writing as well as an eye toward a good poem. However, when I look at my own stuff it’s freakier. I will certainly chop things away but that mean I’ve got to generate new stuff and I may not figure it out that day although I may convince myself that I have. I don’t think that in revising my own work that I separate those two. What do you think time does? If you are working on a poem one day and then you come back to it a week later does that give you an entirely new way of seeing the poem? Well of course you’re a different person in one or two weeks and you’re living in a different set of emotions. Then it becomes finding your way back to that emotional landscape which isn’t always possible even on a good day. And the perspective it adds I think we customarily regard as critical perspective, right? That we can be, a week or two later, more objective about our work. I don’t see revising as an exercise in objectivity. I see it as more subjectivity. I see it as a continuation of chance-taking. You might make the wrong move. It’s amazing when you think of the near infinite number of moves one 291 can make in a reasonably long poem and how many good poems there are even so. It attests to the power of something. I think we’ve talked to this a bit already. I’ve noticed a spectrum between those who consider writing as an act of discovery and those that consider writing an act of presentation. Well, you are bringing up questions of audience and they are complicated and really interesting. I prefer a poem that works, as they say, both on the page and on the stage, that it works orally and it works'read. I do think of art as largely and primarily an act of discovery but I don’t think that means a lack of rapport with audience. There’s performance poetry and I like it although I can’t present it. I’m happy for it because, without a doubt, it’s bringing more people to poetry. I myself am more interested in viewing poetry as an introspective activity and I worry that in this culture introspection is downright mistrusted. So there is call then for poetry to be more presentational. So that it has a product, and I resist that. On the other hand, you are writing to be heard or to be read. You’re writing because your voice wants to be heard. So they are competing forces—definitely more discovery than presentation but then you still have to content with audience considerations. 1 don’t know that they are competing forces. The mind becomes most aware of itself in the presence of others. Writing towards and audience, even if its unconscious which for 292 me it probably is, whether it’s an intimate or a real audience or your mother or God is a way to encounter the self more fully. It requires a greater degree of honesty. It’s a mystery to me why that should be but it really does seem to me the case. What else would explain why—at least to my mind—why poetry is such an eye-opening activity? It is written for people, it is a kind of mutual introspection. You need that audience as a sounding board for your own ideas and your own position? It’s even more primal even than that, you want to be heard. Here maybe is the paradox: writing requires isolation but the isolation, in turn, requires an even more charged need to be heard—heard without the impediment of social braces or amenities or social roles or even familial roles but heard in some way that is, ideally anyway, absolutely unimpeded and direct. It’s interesting to me, that sense of isolation you need in order to write. Do you feel that writer’s need to be in their own space and alone? There are arguments of course that even if you do that you are still drawing on authors read and an audience that you may be thinking of You are at once alone and surrounded by many. Well there you are, you are choosing your own company. You’re saying today my friend will be this writer and this writer and this writer, sure, that makes sense to me. 293 There seems to be a contradiction because in creative writing there is push toward being introspective and the act of writing is seen as an individual act but in creative writing courses—the workshop model being the premier move—this is a primarily social environment. That’s interesting. Certainly the workshop is a social construct. It’s a social construct generated for the sake of mavericks. I try to allow people their own space, to let students determine their own level of social interaction. Some people just don’t want to interact. They just want to listen. I was sort of that way when I was really young myself, I was very shy. If workshop didn’t get in my way I listened a lot which brought me to another part of the workshop experience. Some of it is instruction by example—at least it was for me with my best teachers—they provided an example, a representational of a good life, a life I would be interested in living. I think that instead of the social construct called the “workshop” leading people to common denominators and something like consensus, an ideal workshop leads people towards divergent paths. It helps to have fiiends, ad-hoc fi'iends, and fiiends tell other fiiends when their work is going awry [laughter]. You mentioned the “u-word, ” the unconsciousness. How does the unconscious or the accidental work into how you conceive of writing poetry? I used to be a card-carrying surrealist when I was a very young writer and I still value the surreal notion of tapping into the unconscious. I think good work has to trust to the unknown. I’m also sort of a post-Freudian-Freudian in that I think the unconscious does a 294 lot of disguising, it’s a shape shifter, it’s constantly misleading us, our dream world is constantly confusing us. That’s its intention in a sense, its way of protecting us from things we don’t want to see. At least that’s one way to construe the unconscious. I have to get the unconscious kicked in just to generate stuff and the way I do it, as I said earlier, is to read first. That makes it possible for me to read with a little less ego involved, with less expectations, and less self-conscious. Maybe that makes the unconscious come to play more readily. Then I have to examine what I’ve said and read it because the unconscious is more than capable of throwing out cliche's. Then, when I’ve done that, I have to allow the unconscious to come back into play again. So it’s going back and forth, kind of like dipping into a well, bringing it up, examining it, dropping it back in. There you are, yes. Hemingway talks, for example, about how if you talk about writing too much you can ruin the process or ruin the magic. Do you think there’s a danger in making the process too conscious? Well, Hemingway was laconic. I love Hemingway, he isn’t being taught enough but, to answer your question, only insofar as it takes away from writing time. I rather like talk about poetry. That’s part of what poetry offers, a subject to talk about. I like exchange 295 about poetry and I don’t mind talking about my own methods because it’s one of the ways artists learn from each other. At this point the waitress appears and asks that ubiquitous question: “Everything alright over here?” To which we both respond “yes.” Bill then asks me to repeat the question before taking a slightly different tack in his answer: I think a guarded yes to that, despite what I said, in that the instant I hear a student saying, “I wanted the poem to do this” I instantly distrust the poem. My guess is that the poem has been over consciously directed towards event. I think that in revising in a certain sense you want not to apprehend where you are going and not to understand the poem for as long as possible because the instant you understand it you reduce the poem to the lowest level of your understanding. In fact, I don’t think a poem is done until its ending in a way defies—even if it encourages—paraphrase. . .. Let me say that differently. if the end of the poem I write exceeds my understanding I know maybe it’s worth staying with. Ultimately the end product has to outstrip an individual understanding, an individual consciousness. The poem is smarter than the poet. The poet at his or her most aware. The poem should be read not as an unnatural rightness but as a natural error. That’s what makes it interesting. Humanity has to deal with, for my money, not a transcendence of faults but a construction of faults into something coherent or even beautiful. 296 Do you think that gets at the diflerences between poetry and other types of writing? Say academic writing, for example, may be a type of writing trying to figure something out and end this chapter ends and close it ofl Right now there are a lot of critics who are skewing conventional structure and getting into so-called confessional criticism, that stuff interests me, like the stuff Susan Howe does and Anne Carson. I’ve written essays on poetics and I have to confess I don’t always know where I’m going. I don’t know how it is for you, it may be different because there are different ways of approaching an essay. So in your approach to the essay there is a lot of similarity to your approach with a poem? Similar to poetry to the extent that it is explorative but it approaches audience differently and with slightly different motives. It’s probably a more intelligent form, the essay, but it may be less intimate as well, I don’t know. Then again I’ve read critical essays that just knock me out. How would describe what writing gives back to you? How does this encourage you to write more? Invention is tied into the act that when you write there is something positive that happens, you talk about it being therapeutic, so it encourages you to write more in a way that writing begets more writing. 297 You answered your own question there. What could I add to that? Therapeutic not in the sense of confessional or talking to a therapist but I mean it pretty strictly in the sense of making, the release involved in making which is constructing or creating something that’s informed by the self but has a life outside of the self. Maybe that’s the whole appeal right there. I just keep coming back because its an endlessly fascinating, happy struggle. I know Diane Wakoski talks about her poems as her children. Do have a conception as to what those poems are like for you? I’ve heard Louise Gluck say that the writer is more analogous to a midwife than a mother. That notion means, in a sense, and it appeals to me, because it seems truer of the way I write in terms of figuring out how to get out of the way of the poem and that isn’t exactly birthing. My thinking is that anyway you think about poetry or the process of poetry, if it helps you to write, it probably has truth to it. Stephen King talks about stories already being “out there” and the task is to tap into them. I’m sure it feels like that at times. Sometimes it is as being a medium. The people you read who you have really intimate relations with are kind of channeling. 298 I wanted to speak with you about the pedagogy of writing. Can you teach someone to be a writer? What aspects of poetry can be taught, what aspects can’t be taught? I know you teach so you must believe that some of it is transportable, and you talked about being an example. In my mind the text is the greatest teacher. That’s how I teach classes. Good poetry is the greatest revelation. I guess what you can teach largely is a love of poetry, not only a love of poetry but a trust of poetry. One thing that keeps people fiom writing well or that closes people down is a actually fear of poetry, a fear of the freedom it constitutes. We all have internal censors so one thing a teacher can do is try to help a student contend with internal sensors. Aside from teaching the craft which I believe in entirely you have to go easy in teaching, you have to judge how much a person is ready for and that calls for constant ability to read people that no one has all the time. What can’t you teach? You know what I think it is, you can’t teach a person what to write about. The subject matter has to come to that person, the person has to figure out what he or she values. And that means in art and in one’s experience. You can’t help someone discover his daemon. So if a student comes and says, “I don’t know what to write about... ” Oh sure, there are all sorts of tricks. I’m thinking of graduate students and students who’ve learned the tricks. Those students, they’re on a journey and you can’t take it with them. Sometimes all you can do is swab the decks. That’s not a full, concrete answer but there are other things I guess. If you are going to be a writer you have to be self- 299 motivated. You got to want it yourself. Seeing someone else do it well can be inspirational, you get that from reading. I found that to be true of in my teaching experience, Jason, sometimes I’ll want it more for the student than the student wants it and then I’m an imposition and I have to draw back. What I ’ve found in the workshop that’s helped is that not only recognizing good poetry and what you read in others but finally having something successful go through and thinking ok why is this working well and what can I do to repeat it? You got it. Nothing wrong with a little validation. Quite honestly, in a way students have to be convinced that they are talented and to trust that. Because creative genius is a little fiightening. If you’ve learned something, if it’s an act of discovery, then that means it’s uprooted prior notions. There’s a disruptive nature to discovery. When somebody writes something good sometimes their first instinct is actually to distrust it, to question it, to consider it a fluke because it demands more of them. And I think—I’ve told students this in defense of my teaching methods—that encouragement is the most demanding form of criticism. I work through encouragement. It worked for me. I had great teacher in Jon Anderson and it worked for his students. If he found a poem he really liked he would stop the class and praise the poem and validate the community and not negate any individual in the class and make the notion possible that “Yes, good poetry can be written and it has just happened.” 300 What do you think about the opposite techniques in workshop of really berating a poem and saying this just has to go and this is terrible? I’m of the generation that can’t get away with that. There’s that apocryphal story about Howard Nemerov at Breadloaf taking a student poem and saying, if this were my poem I would divide it in half and then throw away both halves. I think what you’re calling berating can be done in a loving and gentle way, like Phil Levigne. He would berate himself. Then there’s just pure mean spirited. That isn’t cool (laughter). I don’t know where it comes from. There probably are some teachers who want to sabotage their students because they feel threatened by them. My last question is a little more global in nature. Over the years now we ’ve got more of an aligning of poets and writers and a university system. Why do you think that’s happened and do you think that’s a good marriage? There are a couple of answers. It’s happened out of necessity. There’s something distinctly American about it I think and it’s part of a new paradigm—rather than learn and read and immerse yourself in an entire tradition of poetry you try it yourself as well at the same time. I’m ok with that, I’m an American. I’ve grown up with that value system. It’s happened I think largely because of the interest. There’s so much interest in it. A lot of writing programs now are. . .you know, we may accept only every 10th or 20th student. That tells you just how many people want to be doing it and they don’t want to do it to join the academy and if they want to join the academy they want to join the 301 academy so that they can write poetry. I feel ok about it. Jerell said, “I’d pay for the privilege of teaching”—now I wouldn’t go that far and sometimes teaching is a press on time but I think it keeps you honest. It means you have to be coherent and presentable, if you will, and maintain the interest of a group of people for a while, or work among a group of people for a while. I suspect I’ve learned more from my students through the years than I’m aware of and I’m not being disingenuous. Do you think teaching has actually helped you in terms of writing? Sure, if I teach what I love then of course. There are times when I’m reading gobs of student poems and then I just feel swamped; there are those few weeks in semesters. But I’m encouraged by students when they make discoveries, it’s encouraging, it makes me feel good about myself, it makes me feel confident. Yes, I think it helps me to write. 302 Appendix C Elizabeth Kerlikowske, Interview transcript Interview conducted by Jason Wirtz on April 9, 2008 So you ’ve been wondering about invention? Well I was trying to wonder what you were going to ask, so that I’d be prepared. But I was thinking that the way I think about invention in poems or in writing poetry has to do with lots of preparation and accident. I think the more prep—by prep I mean reading all kinds of stuff and trying all different kinds of forms—then I’m ready, I’m prepared for whatever comes along. That’s what I’m interested in because creative writers, poets, talk about that accident part that other people don’t discuss. Academic writers, for example. They’re liars. So you think accidents do take place in that genre just as much? Yes, accidents take place everywhere and I think in a way that’s the difference between people who write and people who are really writers, is when the accident comes you’re 303 there for it, you can accept it, you don’t censor it out as I think some writers do and you are able to capitalize on it. At a conference in New Orleans 1 just came back from we had a meeting on invention and a lot of it was about being receptive to things that maybe others are closing themselves down to. You have to censor certain things out in order to fimction but writers, especially when they’re writing, maybe are trying to open themselves up more. Well, yes. If I really talk about how I feel about writing and how I work I sound like it’s a mystical thing, and it is, but it’s also technical. It’s a marriage of the two. And if I say to you that lines just occur to me, well they actually do. Sometimes when I finish a poem, when it’s really finished, I accept it. It’s like a puzzle piece that fits up into the sky and it fits perfectly when it’s done. How do you know when you’ve got that finished? Well, you just know. I really think it’s organic. Someone sent me the proofs to this new poem that’s going to appear and I told them you just have to take out these two lines because when I read them I feel physically sick, it’s like a cloud that passes over when I go through that part of the poem and those can’t be in there. It’s really an organic feeling for me after the process of editing. I was thinking about it in two terms. I was thinking about a poem I was writing yesterday. Two days ago, I have this book of forms, and I try these new forms and the 304 Welsh ones are always unpronounceable and their syllabic and they rhyme so I wrote a ' poem in this form and it was not my best poem but once I can wrap my head around the form it’s cool. So then today when I went to rewrite a different poem I rewrote it according the way I thought it should sound but it was in the form of the Welsh poem, unintentional but I had absorbed it and there it was presented back to me without my even knowing it which I thought was really cool [laughter]. So something must have been happening. Subconsciously your mind must have been turning that form over until you had adapted it. Yes, but it was the form. . .let me explain it: it’s a quatrain and the first two lines are eight syllables and both end in the A rhyme. The third line is ten syllables but the B rhyme is on the eighth syllable and there’s a minor C rhyme at the end which is repeated in the second syllable of the fourth line which is only six syllables long and then has the B line here. Once I got to the end of the bad poem I understood it pretty well and I could see how it was working and the two days later to be able to just have it come out, I thought that was really cool. I thought that was a good example of what you might be talking about. In that case then one of your invention strategies would be to look through the book of forms and just try diflerent forms on. That’s part of arming myself to be receptive to the moment. 305 What other strategies do you use? I’m so glad you asked that question because I was just writing a poem today and I knew I wanted to write something about Julie [fried who had recently died] but I think sometimes with grief if it’s too soon you end up with a piece of shit. But I was reading a thing by Joseph Campbell who said if you refer to anything as “thou” it gives it these qualities of reverence and awe. So I thought I would write about a day in April but I refer to that day as “thou.” I ended up writing really a poem about Julie disappearing on a day in April but used the word “thou.” And I thought well, I’ll just end up taking that out later but I left it, I really loved it because it sounded very biblical and yet vernacular and I was really happy with the marriage of that and not having a very sentimental thing but just using that weird pronoun really changed things. That’s real similar then to the trying on of dzflerent forms. You ’re trying on a difierent word, a pronoun. Yes, and I’m sure other people do similar things. What do other people do, you’ve talked with them? Well, Diane Wakoski said that when she was younger she would go to Compton ’s Pictured Encyclopedia and leaf through until she found something that would get her going and now she goes to her writing room which is on the second or third story of her 306 house and overlooks the street which is lined with maple trees. Instead of looking at the encyclopedia she looks out this street and has this mental encyclopedia of memories. She uses that window as a way into her memories. I like the Compton’s idea. Yes, it’s very visual. I was looking online and I found these three short prose pieces that you wrote and it says here: “I wrote the drafts of Wishing Jar and Anniversary Waltz in the same sitting one miraculous afternoon. ” My question for you then is, can you describe for me a good day of writing for you, what that looks like? No one is home but me, that’s really key. I like to be alone because even in thinking about Julie I could tell my husband felt bad about it but didn’t want to deal with me feeling anything about it so you clear out that shit. I don’ t remember that day in particular but I do a lot of writing with my students. We had these writing prompts for five-minute stories and Thursday night we did those in class and then Saturday night when I had time to look at them I was able to say these are really good I’m going to work on them. Doing that speed writing thing really helps tap into the unconscious so quickly that I think it’s good to clear everything away and just go and give yourself random stuff because then you find out what you are thinking. I never would have written either one of those pieces without some sort of weird prompt from the universe. 307 So the prompt is working in the same way then that trying on a new form or trying on new words are. I don’t want to say that they are artificial means to finding a poem because I think some poems do come when you sit down and start writing. That happens too but with the way my life is I don’t have gobs of time where I can sit around so I have had to learn to produce when I can. For me, prompt works. I would really like to write some long poems and experiment with long form and I’m hoping this summer I can do that when I have days in a row but teaching at a community college. . .that I get this much done is pretty amazing [laughter]. So in one way the teaching helps you but in another it takes your time. Oh it takes my time but obviously if I’m still teaching than I’m getting more out of it than what I’m spending; and I learn stuff from my students. I’d say another example is that I wrote the book before the one I’m walking around with now, The Shape of Dad, I really wrote it in two months. I was chugging those things out and I look back now and I don’t know how I wrote that much. I guess I just needed to and it had welled up to such a point that now I had time to write this and I’m going to write it and now I got it out of my system I guess. I still write about my dad but I got passed a whole bunch of stuff I guess, I don’t know. 308 You said, “These are pieces fiom a manuscript I wrote this summer about my dad. Midway was the first piece and the rest of the manuscript grew around it. ” So then you’ve got the invention of each individual poem but then you’ve also got to think about the invention of the whole piece and how it ’s going to fit together. Are those two diflerent processes ? I thought of it as making a quilt and so each of those little things is a square of the quilt and they had to be in chronological order because that’s the only way it made sense when you read the book. But I thought each of those quilt squares needed to be complete so that when the whole book was done it would be the entire quilt. You didn ’t think of that then until you put the first quilt square down? I did not but I wrote the first three and thought I could do something with this. I really thought of the book as being photographs, sort of like Diane, from my personal album that I needed to put onto the page which is why that square shape really suited how I was thinking about them. Because I needed to think of them as being photographs and I tried not to comment on them, sort of like “just the facts ma’arn.” So that metaphor of the quilt works for that, it fits that occasion, but it’s not that every book you ’ve written reminds you of a quilt. 309 No, this last one I made the mistake of describing to someone as rnishmash before I got my language down [laughter]. But they are poems I wrote while I was doing other stuff. Like I got my knee replaced so there’s a poem in there about that and the body but there was never any one thing like in the Shape of Dad where it was all about my dad. This one is all about just life. They feel really different to me and I probably like The Shape of Dad better and I like my PhD manuscript a lot which I’m shuffling around places right now. And that’s real outdoorsy, woodsy, Michigan, fimky and I’m real happy with it. Well I love this stuff it ’s fascinating. Yes, it’s a good topic. For my PhD academic paper I ended up writing about Lorene Nydecker, Nancy Eimer suggested her, and Judy Minty and Margaret Atwood and I talked about inlander writer and the great lakes area without using the work regional which was a challenge. Why don ’t you want to use the word regional? Because Nancy told me not to [laughter]. But regional implies an attitude of “it’s only good in this region” whereas the inland term which I took from a visual artist just implied a different way of looking at things that was absent of ocean or mountains. So part of what contributes to how you invent poems then is tied to where you live? 310 I believe it is totally tied to where you live. So you would write completely difierently if you were somewhere else? I think I would have different images. I think we all have a vocabulary of images that we use and I think my vocabulary would change. The plants you see around you are my vocabulary but if I didn’t have those, like when I was out in Colorado I didn’t write poems about water and lakes because there weren’t any. I wrote about other stuff. So you would still be writing, it would just be diflerent. Oh I would be writing but it would feel, sound, be very different. When you talk about invention as a very mystical process but then it’s also very technical, how do you describe the technical side of it? What’s your approach to that? I think technique is overlooked by many people, not the people who have made it, but the women in my group as an example are people who enjoy writing poetry. They read some poetry, they might have studied some poetry in the course of college but they haven’t gotten really deep into it. I still can’t believe this, but if I bring a poem in, nine out of ten times I’ll be the one to point out that it’s a sonnet because they won’t notice and I think that’s pretty basic. 311 So they don’t use form. Not nearly as much as I do, they are free-versy. They rarely write in forms because it’s easier I guess but I think form and all that stuff is part of the training that you need to go through. For example, I took a class in old English which is the only course I had to drop at Western. I realized, “Shit, you need German for this.” But even in my brief exposure to it, I mean it was really interesting. I questioned totally where women were in old English because all the language was about battles and wars and you knew they had to be eating and fucking and shit. Where was that? [laughter] And I learned this form with all the beats and alliteration and I use that but they don’t recognize that it’s this form. I wrote a short story and it sucked so I shrunk it down to a pantoom and it sucked even more. As my son said, “Pantooms are so horrible to read because if it’s a bad line you have to hear is again and if it’s a good line you’ve heard it, it’s a good line.” Yes it can take the magic away if you hear it too often. Yes, so I finally got it down to a sonnet but it was a sonnet that was fragments of the pantoom and that’s what I called it. We didn’t get a chance to talk about it last night but I doubt that anyone would have spotted that it’s a sonnet or known that it was a derivative of a pantoom. I think that technical stuff is so important and they don’t see opportunities to maximize their language. For example this one woman was writing this poem and she had “it” twice in a line and then she had the word “ago” at the end of the next line. Well the “it” she was talking about was snow. Now you’d think that you would make that first 312 “it” snow so you would have that resonance between the two but the sound of it never occurred to her it was all about what she was trying to say. It sounds like your approach does not begin with an idea that you are trying to get on the page but for the people in your group, that’s where they begin. They have a feeling or idea they want to express and they just put the language out there to do that. And you ’re working from the other way around. Yes, and if there is something I really want to say I will write an editorial or something because that’s what that’s for but to me poetry is about exploring and trying to figure out what’s out there to know. And there’s another woman in the group, and she has two books, and she’s got a poem called, “A Room Full of Zeroes.” I could tell that her assignment to herself was, “write about what it would look like if a room were full of zeroes.” So then there’s this string of images that don’t do anything else, they don’t cohere. I ask, Why are you writing this poem? Why are zeroes interesting to you? What is it about zeroes? And none of that is there. It’s just “here are these pretty pictures” and none of that is satisfying, at least to me. Where’s the jump to poetry? This is just language. Well that’s an interesting way to put it: Where’s the jump to poetry. S0 in your estimation the jump to poetry then is pushing yourself beyond literal interpretation and exploring with words something difl"erent. 313 Yes and it’s beyond what you know. You have to be willing to go beyond what you know to find out more. Dybek talks about that too where he says, “you will never be as smart as what you write” because there are so many various interpretation because you are exploring. That’s why it ’5 wrong to go to the author for an interpretation because a lot of the time the author doesn’t even know what they ’ve done. I think that’s true. If you read your stuff over sometimes, or someone might point out something and you’ll realize, “God, that’s really good.” But again that’s training and ear. I think people really ignore ear also. I think how a poem sounds is very important. And reading it out loud, that’s how I test my poems. Test them by reading them out loud? No, I give my husband a big glass of whiskey and then he reads it out loud without ever having seen it before so I can just hear it and if he stumbles or if they are parts that just sound like shit then I know. I really need to hear it read cold by somebody because that helps me to know how it’s going to sound. That’s a great way to do it. 314 It works well. The other night, the poem I was trying to cut down from the pantoom form, and every time he got to a point in the poem where is read “the daughter” and it was very narrative he just read it, “the daughter! ” and I just couldn’t wait for him to be done so that I could grab it and just start cutting shit out of it [laughter]. That process of giving it to your husband then, it’s a separate thought process right? You’ve got the separation of the creator and editor then right? They have to be utterly separate. 1 mean that’s the problem with students. They say, “I have to have the perfect first sentence for my paper,” and I tell them, “no, you don’t.” But they think they do and a lot of people have writer’s block because they can’t start with the perfect line and I’m way beyond that. I can write a whole bunch of shit and when I finally hit the perfect line I know it. How does the editor function then? You’re reading through your own stufl as if it were written by someone else? I do try to do it that way, but not that same day. So a little time lapse has to be there? Some. The if-ier I am about it the longer I need to wait until I can go back to it. Like the one I wrote about Julie today, I think it’s pretty good, I don’t think it needs a lot done to 315 it. But the one that I wrote in the weird form, I might look at that again and see if there’s anything salvageable but the experience of doing it might have been the thing. Well that’s interesting too. Just the experience of doing something might eventually, like it did before, play a part in a different piece of writing. Exactly. It’s not about product, it’s about learning about it. You’re learning basically fiom yourself then? Well, no, you’re also learning fi'om other people right? Well yes, and even though I fought tooth and nail with almost everyone I had for class for the PhD I learned a lot. I would say that was a really valuable experience. The forms classes were wonderful and even the reading material that I hated was good for me. What were you fighting about? I think part of it was fighting the fact that I waited so long to go to school. By the time I did my PhD defense everyone on the committee was younger than I was. And the reason I chose the people on my committee had nothing to do with their intellectual qualifications, they were all personal choices for me. When I got to the end, that was for me. Plus, I walked up there, turned my stuff in and walked home [laughter]. 316 Do you recognize changes in your invention approach over the years? Oh yeah, right now I’m into air. I like to give my poems lots of air, so I’m trying to put lots of space on the page unless it’s in a form because then if it’s a sonnet it will look like a sonnet. I do like those big paragraphs of stuff on the page, I’m just not writing those now. That was good for a while but now I’m into air and space. That’s still form on the page right? It is. It’s kind of it’s own form. I just like forms, even non-forms. Do you find that even though you’ve experimented with all these difikrent forms that you have recurring themes that you come back to or is it really just completely open? Oh, there are always recurring themes. You should talk to my husband. He will say, “This is a poor Beth poem” and I’ll say, “I know that, read it anyway” [laughter]. That would be an area, dealing with the past. When I look back on my poems I can tell they’re mine. There’s something about how I use language and I think this has to do with something I discovered early on in my teaching which was that people do not use verbs as they could. Verbs are everything in a poem. You can have all these great things happening but if you’re language is all flat it’s boring. You can say, “is skating,” or you can say, “skates.” Whatever the simplest form of that words is that’s the strongest. That’s 317 just one of my observations. I pay attention to these observations that I’ve come across and they seem to hold true and I try to teach that in my fieshman composition courses. So when you ’re editing a lot of what you ’re trying to do is paring down and sharpening the language and condensing. Yes, and I’m a person who believes you should write way more than you need so then you can cut and still have something lefi. And if it ends up short, great, and if it ends up longer, fine but unlikely. This is a unique question but I’ve read about this in other places—a fear with creative writers to make their writing process overly-conscious? Is there any sort of hesitation you have of thinking about how it is you do what you do and worrying that if you know too much then it will stifle the process? Nope [laughter]. I really don’t. I think the more you know the better and I think knowing how you work is really crucial. I’m mystical in that I recognize that there is mystery in the process but I’m not mystical in that I don’t believe that if I talk about it I will be robbed of that power. That’s really just superstition, and I don’t think I’m a very superstitious person so my writing wouldn’t be either. Not superstitious yet you definitely think there is mystery involved. 318 Absolutely. That’s how I feel too. It’s a weird thing to get your head around because in one sense I’m such an atheist about everything but then in terms of writing there’s nothing that can be pinned down and once you do then you ’ve limited yourself in a way. I would have to say that I’m an atheist but I believe in a power, there is some intellect out there guiding my hand or my brain or something. It’s pretty amazing. You mean guiding your hand as if you can tap into something at times? Sometimes. I had an experience once where I was up in the mountains of Colorado. I woke up and I could almost literally hear this voice telling me this story and it was in black dialogue. I wrote it all down and it was published in this philosophy journal. It was like taking dictations. I’ve almost never had that again but I accepted it when it came. I didn’t say, “Well that’s really weird.” I just said, “Well let me get a pen.” You still to this day don’t know where that camefiom? I have no idea. Joyce Carol Oates talks about experiences like that too. She wrote an entire novel in which she felt like she was channeling another author who was actually getting in the 319 way of the novel she wanted to write so she had to write everything down that he was saying so that she could go back to what she wanted to write. Actually I did have that experience once before. It was really early. I was out at Amherst and was sitting in this bedroom. My daughter and I had gone out to visit this arboretum and there was a huge tree there. I got back to my room and I started to write this story about a girl who was coming from Europe and leaving her family behind and I had no idea what the hell it was. At the end I’m writing and I’m sobbing and it was really intense. I felt really channeled that time. So you felt while you were writing you were discovering what was happening. I was. I had no idea what was going on. I was talking in broken English, it was weird but very cool. Well Dybek and Stephen King talk about how if you are in a place and you don’t know what’s going to happen next then that’s actually better for the writing because the reader isn ’t going to be able to guess what ’5 coming next. Do you think there are aspects of how you invent that play out directly into the final product? I know they do, I guess my question is really: How do you think the way that you invent influences what you come up with in the end? Attention to form, for example, how do you think that then translates into how people read your poems. 320 I think one of the things that other people would say about my poems is that you never know what you’re going to get. So there’s an element of surprise. When I do readings I like to be funny because I can be really funny. Oh, and comedy works at readings. And that’s the easier thing to do because it’s way harder to be serious at a reading because that’s scary. I’m planning tomorrow on reading my the “Bipolar Express” which students seem to love because it’s full of drugs [laughter]. I have a wide range of things that I can do, I can do satire, I can do humor, I write editorials for the school paper, I do all different kinds of stuff and I think the training of invention and technique and all that stuff just makes me able to. . .sometimes I think I’m too schizophrenic because it doesn’t all fall into order but that’ not how my life is. So if you had an anthology itjust wouldn’t look like the traditional anthology? I wouldn’t look like one person’s consistent mind. It would look like one person’s scattered mind. Trying on all these different hats. Yes, to achieve whatever end I can achieve. If I went about something the same way every time that would be really boring for me. If I only wrote sonnets—I guess I’d learn a 321 lot about the sonnet—but I can’t imagine just doing that. You can only do that so much before you feel as though you are losing control of your product. I think it makes me have a wide range of ways that I can express myself. In terms of pedagogy, teaching, do you think you can teach someone to be a poet? I guess the other question is what aspects can be taught and what aspects can’t be taught? I think that’s a really interesting question. I think you can definitely teach technique. That’s what you can teach. And there’s form and don’t do this and do that, but you can’t teach vision. People either have vision or they don’t have vision and you can’t teach that leap that I talked about earlier from the words to beyond the words, I don’t think you can teach that. I think sometimes you can see a student is going to make that leap and you can say “that’s it.” I remember when Herb Scott did that for me. He said, “This is the first real poem that you’ve written” and I celebrated because I had written zillions of poems before that but I saw how that poem was different and it made that leap to something beyond what it was. So in that moment he taught you—not to make the leap—but to identify it so that you could do it again. I was so sad when he died. *off-topic interlude* 322 What do you mean by the fact that you can’t teach a student vision? The vision is being able to know. . .if the student is writing a poem about dogs, can you look at that poem about dogs and see that it could be more than that? Seeing the possibilities of it is vision, looking beyond the page, almost what you would see if you squinted at it and there would be this other poem. Being aware of the possibilities that are out there. I could look at a student’s work and say, “Oh my God you’re two sentences away from being brilliant here,” but it’s not there. When I try to talk to them about what direction a poem could go in they say, “No, I want it to be this.” And I think, “Well, your wanting it is getting in the way of what it is.” They are overly literal? Well, they had something in mind when they started and by god that’s what it’s going to be even if it’s not that. And I want to say, “Let it go here, that’s where it should go” and they say, “No, it needs to be this, that was my plan.” That’s interesting. I ’ve felt that before. Ted Kooser has a little paragraph that I remember printing out and copying because he said that he ’11 start with an idea to write the poem but then there’s this moment where he has to recognize where the poem wants to do something diffirent and it ’s no longer looking at the idea it’s about looking at the 323 poem. He actually borrowed this notion fi'om a painter. If students block this move then they shut this process down. Yes, students will think, “The assignment was this.” I try to tell them, “The assignment was this but if you get a better idea for Christ-sakes do that.” Their training hasn’t taught them to do that before though. Well that’s what school is about, training people to work and be obedient. And that’s why we’re all bad people [laughter]. I want to be disobedient. In fact, when I first took a full time job I thought, “I do not know if I belong here, I do not know if I can go to the same place everyday, work with the same people everyday, and be part of a system because I fought the system so hard.” But as it turns out, it’s great. The students change every few months, I love my colleagues and I get to be a wild, radical person in the classroom that really gets people thinking and it’s really exciting. One of my ideas on invention is that invention has a lot to do with identity. What you ’re saying is the same thing in which you envision yourself as this person who is not part of the system and that obviously fits into how you compose poetry. Yes, I guess. I don’t know, I’ve been doing this for so long. In the tenth grade I made this little office for myself and I loved e.e. cummins because he broke every rule that I had 324 been taught and I thought this is what I want to do, I want to break all these rules. I want to be not like “them” [laughter] which is a very vague goal but I managed to live that. If a student came to you with questions about how to come up with ideas about writing what would you say? I have a student in my class right now, he’s almost my age, and he asks, “Where do you come up with those bizarre ideas? Are you on acid or something?” I say, “No you just look around.” I was typing to him and I saw a picture of a hat and I said, “The hat is lonely, the snow is this.” This is not hard. Take a verb, take a noun, take an adjective that don’t go together and put them together. But he just can’t. He thinks you have to do something special or you have to be on drugs. That’s his biggest thing, he thinks you have to be on drugs. No you don’t have to be on drugs, you have to loosen up your head. But that ’s a learned process. I guess it is learned. Do you feel as though you learned it? I feel that we all do that and school unlearns that from us; the process of our education is unlearning to think that way and if you can hang on to your thinking through school and 325 get through that then you are ok. But if you’ve been a good student then you will be just like him. The disobedience then comes in there almost as a saving grace to keep you from thinking in line and putting those blinders on. Especially when I was a poet in schools, there was the kid up by the desk always a boy always left-handed always sitting next to the teacher because she had to keep him in line, I expected great things from that kid because I knew he was my kind of person. He’s a trouble-maker, he would ask questions, he was thinking and that is disruptive in a classroom. More poets are aligning with the university. Is that a healthy marriage? Is that a necessity? It’s become a necessity. I think there’s a big gulf between people who are university poets and people who are in the community. That was part of my fight with doing the PhD thing because I am of the community. I like to have people who are not overly educated be able to understand my poems. I think that’s part of my mission in this life, to do that, to work with Friends of Poetry and have the contest for kids because people hook into it when they’re kids. This is not to say bad things about the people at the university but they rarely come to things in town, they are very separate fiom what we’re doing in town. 326 Do you see that at Western? Yes, totally at Western. When ever do those people come to anything at the Kalamazoo public library? Now when I had Stuart [Dybek] come and read, and he was one of the first in a series that we ever had and I said to him, “I’ve never asked you for a favor and this is it” then we got a ton of people. Yes I was there, it was packed. But it doesn’t happen many other times; and there are graduate students we have read and it’s just that they’re very separate. That seems crazy to me and wrong. I think they are doing a disservice to language in the community. And even the community literary arts awards, a lot of people don’t enter it, I’ve entered it and won but a lot of people don’t and it’s not because they don’t care about the community—they’re professional poets, what if they lose to some rookie fi'om Galesburg? How would that feel? Well, you need to know how that would feel, you need to know how regular people read your writing. I think it’s pretty basic. If you just hang around with your fiiends and only read each other than you can be comfortable. Take it out in the world and see how it goes. Basically, your greatest fear in moving toward that end of the spectrum is that you would lose touch with language that’s accessible to everyone. 327 Oh yeah. I am so grateful that I have so many black students. Black language is so alive and changing. This woman wrote a paper and in it wrote, “My Grandmother really put her foot in this dis ” and I said “What? That sounds awful” and she said, “No, that means she made it really good, put her foot in it.” I love that kind of talk, to me it’s so exciting. But at the same time you can’t talk this way and get a job in a bank. You just can’t do it, that’s how it is. So I try to approach even teaching in a very political way and say, “They’re looking for a way to not give you that job. Don’t give it to them. Get the job, talk how you want to, but know that you have to write like this. So when teaching composition then you ’ve got to almost draw that line and be clear about the fact that there are times to use your own language and be exploratory but there are also times to learn the system language so that you can move ahead. Yes, because it’s political. So it’s a real code-switching. It is a code-switching. 328 Appendix D Stuart Dybek, Interview Transcript Telephone interview conducted by Jason Wirtz on April 28, 2008 329 If you were to take me through a typical successful day of writing for you what would that look like? In terms of process? Yes, because I ’m really interested in invention. How people come up with their ideas. I know I’ve talked with you before about this. You’ve said things like the worst place to be is a brown-belt because you are thinking through things instead of reacting. When I spoke with Bill Olsen he said he sits down and reads a lot of writing that ’s unfamiliar and that gets him jotting down notes and when he reaches a critical mass of notes he feels propelled to the typewriter. Diane Wakoski used to look through Compton’s pictured encyclopedia until she got something that got her moving and now she sits in her writing room and has her own kind of mental encyclopedia that she leafs through to get some ideas going. Do you have a similar process when you sit down to write? It varies so much that it’s hard to generalize about. It depends on what I’m working on. For instance, right now I’m trying to put together a book that would be made up of pieces that I have already published in magazines over the last 15 years, or even 20, pieces that didn’t belong in my other books. So the process in this particular instance is to try to discern a pattern in those pieces so that I can shape some form out of them so that they would suggest other pieces that I may write to fill that form out. But that’s a very different process than if I were just writing from scratch or mining notebooks as I do sometimes for ideas or going back to boxes of earlier drafts for pieces that I’m ready to 330 take another shot at. In each case it’s a different process. The one generalization that I would make is that frequently by this point in my life I’m relying on some degree on writing that I did earlier. It’s like there almost a collaboration between present and past. Can you talk about that collaboration? I’ll do most anything to escape from first draft and so sometimes what I’m looking for is something that I’ve sketched out or wrote some version of sometime previously that I can then use as a basis, a springboard. In that way, illusion or not, it doesn’t seem exactly like I’m generating first draft material but that I’m reacting to something else. Sometimes that’s illusory but it’s an illusion that helps. So you feel as though responding is where you feel comfortable and so it’s easier to do that than starting fiom scratch? Yes, I hate starting from scratch. Sometimes I’m looking for a kind of a little help from my former self. When you talk about invention over time, such as this strategy, that is not an invention strategy that you were able to use earlier. Now you’re relying on looking back at piece that you ’ve already written. What did you do to get those pieces done in the fist place? 331 A lot of times what I did is lost in the mists of time. In the case of the material I’m working with now some of it came out of a chapbook called The Story of Misk that was published back in the nineties. Again, speaking only about this particular instance, even when I published that chapbook it seemed to me like a rehearsal for a more ambitious, complex book that would come later. The stuff I was working with in that book were prose poems and short shorts. 1 had already tried different strategies for combining those things which, by the way, the French just refer to by the term fragments. The first book I ever published, Brass Knuckles, was a book of poems that had a healthy dose of prose poems in it. Years later I published a book called The Coast of Chicago that staggered prose poems and/or short shorts with more conventional stories. There’s been this kind of theme in my writing life over many years of writing these kinds of individual short pieces and then figuring out what the hell to do with them. I’m always more interested in sequence when I’m working with “fragments” than I am with the individual fiagments. But the individual fragment has to be written in order for me to be able to generate the sequence because what I’m looking for is individual pieces, as I’ve said earlier, a pattern. Once I see the pattern, or once I make up the pattern, maybe it isn’t there but I’ve made it up—that pattern becomes generative of pieces I wouldn’t have written without it. It’s a kind of relationship. Rather than looking to dominate this piece with a previous agenda what I’m looking to do is have this relationship with stuff that’s already written that I’m going to surrender to, or that is going to prompt from me something I wouldn’t ordinarily have written. I think that any poet who works with a book understands that process, any musician that works with an “album” understands that process, and finally any novelist does—that is, in the course of writing a novel, the novel itself is going to demand fiom 332 you something you might not have thought of at the beginning of the process. I’m not claiming any particular uniqueness for it. That ties into a lot of things that I’ve heard. Olsen talks about “listening the poem forward, ” that the poetic form takes over and starts to dictate what comes next. That’s it exactly. I just heard a quote the other day actually, I think it was Robert Frost, who said that if there are 29 poems in a book the 30“ is the book itself so that kind of relationship between the pieces is what you ’re after right? Well that’s excellent. Can you talk about how genre works into this. I know you are working especially with a lot of dijferent forms with short shorts, poems, short story, and short stories that turn into a novel. I’m messing around with monologues now. I’ve become increasingly interested in theatre. Not theatre but what I would call the dramatic mode, real time dialogue. I’m always looking for counterpoints, juxtapositions, and genre is one of them. The other thing about genre is that it comes with a historical, allusive potential that one can engage. It offers that kind of point, counterpoint that becomes a formal element. As an example, 333 when you stagger prose poems and short shorts with more conventional stories one of the things you’re working with is counterpointing the lyrical, which frequently is what prose poems and short shorts are about, with narrative. If you counterpointed as J erzy Kosinski does or as Italo Calvino does. In Invisible Cities, Calvino counterpoints dialogues between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo and in Steps J erzy Kosinski counterpoints dialogues between two unidentified lovers with narrative pieces. You can say what they’re doing is they are’counterpointing the dramatic mode with—in Invisible Cities— the lyrical mode because Calvino is working, in terms of his theme and variation of images about these cities. In the Kosinski book he’s working with contrasting the dramatic mode, these dialogues, with the narrative mode because the pieces in between are telling stories. It’s kind of my own deal to be talking about these modes. If you wanted to talk about genre you could say you are contrasting little dramatic pieces with narrative vignettes or lyrical vignettes. In context of the book it’s the dynamic that you’re working with and usually when you’re messing around with genre that’s what you’re after, it’s the dynamic that exists between these various genres and often getting in the overlap between them which is a kind of no-man’s land, meaning that you’ve created an unpredictable area. One of the things that genre is, it’s frequently predictive. That is, if you know what a detective story is or you know what a science fiction story is, even to some degree a “literary story” although that’s less predictive, then you know what the predictions and expectations of the genre will be. But if you get into that lip between two different genres it becomes suddenly far less predictive. 334 That’s definitely a generative, inventive place then in the same way that you might juxtapose two diflerent ideas in a story to create something new you’re doing the same with genre. It’s not something new—it’s less conventional, less expected, more unpredictable. New is fine, it just seems a bit more self-congratulatory [laughter]. In this broad view of writing on a spectrum from an act of discovery to an act of presentation, do you find yourself working within both of these? Is it much more discovery? Again it depends on the piece. Some pieces because they are based on experience you are writing to a story that’s already been told to you in terms of personal history. But other pieces, if they are based more on invention, sometimes you don’t know from sentence to sentence where you’re going next and each sentence is being invented. Then there are some writers who invent each sentence and other writers you just don’t feel that they have the technical chops to do that. I’ll give you an example. When I read Eudora Welty I feel she is inventing every sentence she writes. I don’t want to pick anybody out as a negative example but there are many writers I read who I don’t feel that they are inventing sentence by sentence. There are a lot of musicians like that. For you that’s actually a negative if you don ’t feel that there ’s that inventiveness. 335 Well my favorite writers frequently are writers I feel that each sentence is inventive and the piece as a whole is freshly invented. I think one of the things that genre writing at its worst allows for is that the reader is so looking forward to the fulfillment of the genre that they are less interested in that kind of invention and sometimes in fact it might even be a distraction. If you regard writing as discovery what you try to do fiequently is place yourself in a situation where you don’t know where you are going and you’re looking for patterns, you’re feeling your way for patterns, you’re actually looking for accidents, you want accidents to happen. You can’t create the accident, but you’re hoping to create the condition that might create an accident. That translates directly into how the writing is read then because if the writer is surprised than the reader will be as well. Well you hope so. You hope that whatever feeling has taken you by surprise will take the reader by surprise as well. My last question here is in a dijferent mode of thought. What aspect of writing do you think can be taught and what aspects do you think can not be taught? What I have to say on the subject is just, and it seems obvious to me, that if you go into a painting class you can figure they can teach you how to mix colors and how to do perspective. If you go into a music class they’ll teach you how to operate your instrument or teach you the art of composition. In other words, the craft can always be taught in all 336 the arts, that’s what you study. When people say you can’t teach somebody to be Beethoven or you can’t teach somebody to be Matisse or you can’t teach somebody to be Charlie Parker well of course you can’t. That’s always seemed so stupid to me. The fact of the matter is that you never hear that with the other arts but you always hear it in writing, that you can’t teach somebody to be Ernest Hemingway. Well, no you can’t [laughter] but just as the other arts have a tradition, a history, and features of craft and you can teach the history, you can teach the tradition, you can teach features of craft, all those things can be taught. And if they’re not learned in a classroom than the person has to learn them on their own and it’s usually some combination. Hopefirlly you can accelerate what somebody would have to learn on their own. [pause] Can you teach somebody to be more imaginative? I think on rare occasion you can by devising certain exercises but that’s gravy. I’m a little wary of people who put all their energy in that direction actually because sometimes I think it can become autocratic. You mean teachers who put their energy in that direction? Entirely in the direction of stimulating the imagination. I think craft stimulates the imagination and sometimes becomes inseparable fiom it. I have over years of teaching found certain exercises, in certain situations for certain people, do in fact seem to generate some imaginative work but, for me, that’s secondary to teaching craft. Teaching craft is the primary. 337 Yes, especially in the context of academia where writing, unlike the other arts, is not in a fine arts departnrent but mostly in an English. department in which people are mostly taught courses on how to read. Very little attention is ever paid in an English department, in English courses, to craft. So if they don’t get it in the writing classes they’re not getting it. Do you think it’s a good thing that ’s happened that more and more creative writers are housed within the English department or within the university? With the exception of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and very few other programs, all writing programs are housed within English departments. Before that they weren’t any writing programs. Writing programs are relatively new to academia. Places like Iowa and Stanford generated that and from about 1980 on there’s been this huge growth and explosion, hard to figure out why, I have ideas but I’m not going to digress into them now. Traditionally those programs have all been in English departments. Do you think that ’3 been good for both English departments and creative writing as a field ? Generally, yes but I think sometimes not enough distinction is made between. . .I think that there’s some confusion between what creative writing is about as opposed to what the study of English is about. 338 They’re competing forces then because a good critic and a good writer are two diflerent things. I’m not sure that in an English department courses are about being a critic, Jason. I think they’re about reading, the art of reading. Reading as a... ? You know criticism can be a version of reading and it’s also a long tradition of writing— writing in which the subject is reading and I don’t think that English courses are necessarily about turning everybody into a critic. Primarily they are about acquainting somebody with the history of the language we call English and its literature. Where do you think that confusion comesfi'om then? I think that most of the classes are about reading. One of the things I’ve noticed in my creative writing classes is that people come in there as very good readers and they want to talk about a piece of writing as readers and what I keep trying to get them to do is talk about it as a piece of writing, how it was made rather than what it means. You can’t talk about something totally disregarding what it means but you can have your priorities. So basically reading it as a writer. 339 Yes. So when Bill Olsen talks about the text being the best teacher that’s what he’s referring to then—reading something and trying to figure out how this was written and then trying to use those same moves yourself? I would be in general agreement with that. 340 Appendix E Diane Seuss, Interview transcript Interview conducted by Jason Wirtz on July 8, 2008 I ’m looking at invention and what that means. Well, what do you think it means? Invention in poetry? Yes. I guess I think it means the opposite of Charles Simic Daughter, she had found me reading Simic at the table when she arrived for the interview] it means writing with your nose to the pavement, with your nose to the path and without preconceptions and so every time it’s a new discovery, it’s a new layer rather than “this is what I do so that’s what I’ll do today. I write about my father so I’ll write another thing about my father.” It’s a reinvention every time which is a really rough way to go [laughter]. So that’s not what you try to do, or is it? I try to reinvent every time, yes. And you know the problem with that is that there is an evolution to your work that way but what you wrote a year ago may not look very much like what you wrote today and so having a consistent body of work may be harder if 341 you’re constantly taking the next step. For me, that’s always been the most important part of writing, feeling as though I am walking into new territory. So constantly exploring. Writing to discover as opposed to writing to present something. Right. In fact, when I teach writing I say “If you already know where you are going to end up go have a picnic.” I think then just go enjoy the day. But if the poem leads you, if you are willing to be led, then it will lead you somewhere else. I have this poem that was from. . .I spent some time on Drummond Island... I ’ve been there. Did you go out to the maxim planes? No, we ’ve just gone fishing out there. There are these planes that are absolutely devoid of people and apparently it looks like the world looked before human beings. One of the few places left like that. There are sandhill cranes out there and stacks of boulders that no one knows kind of how they get stacked that way. The poem was kind of like, I think it was called “Maker,” and it was like “anything I want to meet out here I can meet, the only boundary is fear.” So if I want to meet Jesus, I’ll meet Jesus. If I want to meet the dead, I’ll meet the dead. The only 342 boundary is fear. And that’s what I think invention is, being willing to be out there alone, wherever out there is, and meet the next specter. When you say, “ Where the poem leads you, ” this is scarily similar to what I ’ve heard Bill Olsen talk about, he talks about “listening the poem forward, ” Stuart Dybek talks about “Surrendering to the poem, ” Kerlikowske is constantly looking to explore and find what’s out there. What is that process? It’s not traditional academic writing where you’ve got “Ok here’s my thesis and now I’ve got to prove it. ” Yes, it’s the opposite. So is it coming from somewhere else? You can think of it a couple ways. Toni Morrison talks about listening the ancestors. Lucille Clifton, listening to the voices. For me it feels like maybe collective unconscious, tapping into a place, you know that pool, that we can all tap into if we can get down there. And I think it’s a matter of a certain type of discipline like meditation but you go into it through writing. Is it still your voice? Yes. 343 So it’s a paradox. It’s your voice but yet a collective sort of understanding that’s shared by all humans? Let me think about that. It’s a place where I know more than I know. I don’t think I’m that bright, but I think the imagination is really bright. And I don’t claim it as mine. I claim it as something that if I’m lucky I can ride the wave, but it’s not my wave it’s bigger than me. So you ’re tapping into something. Kerlikowske talks about channeling. She had an experience where she’s hearing these voices and she gets a pen to write it down and I know Joyce Carol Oates talks about that too. Usually my poems come. . .I’ll have a first line and that’s all I’ll have when I sit down and then I really do surrender to the poem at that point. It’s weird because it sounds very mystical and partly it is, but partly it’s really logical too. I think that’s what’s cool about it, two parts of the brain working in tandem. Because there’s a lot of distraction going on like [interruption]. The formal stuff, what I’m thinking about line, what I’m thinking about music, that’s nice and distracting and that allows the other stuff to kind of rise. I think it’s a dual process, it’s two tracks at once, and that is it’s both mystical and really analytical and that’s why the attention is so keen, that’s why it’s such a nice feeling, because everything is working together when you’re cooking. 344 So it’s really the craft that gives way to the content then, this focus on what you are doing line by line, crafi, rhythm, sound, it’s sort of a way to get there? Well I think that’s one way to get there. I think if you are over-focused on that then you can become a slave to that. Con Hillberry is my mentor and we talk a lot about that. When he first started writing he was very much a Richard Wilbur follower, Philip Larkin, blank verse, and he was really good at writing a natural line that was still blank verse and writing in form. And then I was this kid who never had any real schooling in writing and I would write. . .I didn’t know you were supposed to have a left margin, so my stuff would be all over the place and his stuff was completely orderly and we met, I was sixteen and he was older, forty, and started influencing each other. Really we were representative of those two sides coming together. Apollonian and Dionysian. Exactly. His most recent book, really his last three books, you can just see him fanning out, literally he has poems where he’s lost. There’s one called “Path to the Cabin” where he’s just absolutely lost and by the end, the last line is “I’m down on all fours without a notion of where to go.” And I have kind of allowed myself to be brought into the corral a little more. He would probably say that craft obsession alone isn’t going to get you there. But having the distraction of craft and the intention of allowing yourself to be afraid might be the best combo. 345 So the authors I’ve talked to, it seems to me there’s a theme that aligns with what you ’re saying that you learn craft in order to forget it. Right So you’re moving toward working instinctually and intuitively. Right Yes. So where you almost started instinctually and then you needed crafi in order to help... Rope me in. And actually I teach, I’m a pretty craft-oriented teacher, I have a three- process writing major so they start with intro to creative writing and it’s very much “finding a voice” and very wild and then in intermediate poetry they read everybody and they imitate almost like painting the masters and so my theory is find a voice and then give it away and then take what you learn fiom apprenticing and then bring the raw back in, and then you have something in advanced poetry and that is the ability. . .you sort of then internalize the craft lessons and you’ve got the raw will I guess to know that it’s an excursion into the wilderness but you’ve got tools. You can’t just go into the wilderness without tools. But craft alone, don’t you think it’s boring? Without energy, then sure. Louise Gluck and Diane Wakoski have both done this, where they’ve taken old poems and thought, “Well that could be better ” and they tidy them up and in tiaying them up they’ve lost all the original energy. My revision theory is the opposite of tidying, it’s funny, I can’t remember what I’ve called it in a workshop I’ve taught but basically, fucking it up. I think a poem is much more interesting if you think of revision as fucking it up, as disemboweling it rather than making it neater. What then? Do you have a neater turd? I don’t know. I think revision ought to be about evisceration. One of the themes I’ve also come across with revision is that there ’s still very much invention within revision. These found places to reinvent and what you ’re talking about is really the same thing where revision really is to start over again. Right. It’s sometimes writing the poem’s shadow. What I like to ask of my own work and other people’s is what was the original intention and has it been fulfilled and when we get to the end. . .you know somebody said of Emily Dickinson, her frrst line is everybody else’s last line. And I think one of the most lethal things is to feel like poems need to wrap up or resolve. So to rip the resolution off the end of the poem and to figure out now what, if I don’t resolve, if I don’t neaten it up and tie it off with a bow, instead pull the rug out from under myself, then where do I go? 347 Bill Olsen talks about that where he wants to still not completely understand the poem at the end. If it still retains mystery then it’s worthwhile. Oh yeah, when Hillberry comes to my classes and the students say “why this, why that” he usually says that’s yours to figure out, I haven’t a clue. And I think that’s a really good answer. I usually have a theory of why something is there or why I’m really obsessed with something or interested in something but in a lot of ways the writer is the last to know. If you know too much about every working part then there’s probably a problem. Especially now. I think our need for poetry. . .what we need poetry to be is different fi'om what we needed poetry to be in the Renaissance or other literary periods. We’re looking for a kind of discovery, not just in language but in meaning that would have been threatening in earlier times. And I’m interested in language poems too, usurping the sentence. [pause] Ok, where are we? One of the questions that ’s been usefitl is: T ake me through a successfitl day of writing, what does that look like to you? I write a lot in my head because I have a really complicated life. I’m a full-time teacher, single-parent, and I do a lot of other stuff, I read Tarot cards for people, so a lot of my writing, I’ll have a line, I’m living with the core for a while, so a lot of times a successful day fi'om the outside nobody would know what was going on, I would be chopping the broccoli but then night comes, and I’m alone. 348 You have to be alone? Yes. Why is that? I need complete focus. The distractions of other people really get to me. Yeah, I need to be alone. And then I get out that first line and then usually it just sort of pours forth fiom there and everything. . .because I’ve been writing long enough everything is internal and instinctive, there’s that great groove you get where, as I’ve said, both of those parts are working together at the same time and I know when I’m being successful, I know when I’m onto something and I feel more alive and I feel “Oh my God, this is the best thing I’ve ever done.” So the reason you know if it ’s a good poem, and the reason you know you’re onto something, is that you feel more alive, you feel excited about it. And I’m like “Holy shit where did that come from?” So there ’s surprises. Yes! 349 And accidents, most of the authors talk about that too. What role does surprise and accident play? For me it’s probably ninety-percent. Did I do this when you were at the Third-Coast Writing Project, what my son’s haircut taught me about flying? Yes. So all I knew was that I was remembering when my kid got all his hair chopped off and the name of the beautician was the name of a family down in Niles where I’m from and they had had this farm where there was a two-headed lamb born back in the civil war. And I knew we were flying to Florida and I didn’t like to fly. So that’s what I knew when I sat down: haircut, that feeling, two-headed lamb that image, fear of leaving the earth. That’s what I knew. So you are juxtaposing diflerent things then. I’m using the writing to find the place where those. . .I feel like in a platonic sense there’s a connection and the writing helps me find it. Maybe I’m inventing a connection but it almost feels like the writing is helping me to discern the connection that’s there, that’s hidden from me. But you sense it. 350 I sense it. I sense there’s a connection, yes. So that’s where the first lines, first idea come fiom, you’re sensing... A connection. Yes, what’s the first line of that poem? I can’t remember but I knew that there was something about that two-headed lamb and Dylan’s little locks falling to the ground that connected. If I had tried to logic it out I don’t think I would have gotten anywhere because that third element, the fear of leaving the earth, made it not sentimental. It would have been an easy sentimental thing: the poor little innocent animal. But the fear of leaving the earth, the desire to be two, to be earth and air, and for him to be able to be innocent and experienced came through the wisdom of the poem, of the process, the wisdom of the process. So that’s the invention strategy then you generally use, the primary one, is that you ’re feeling these connections, thinking about them, sort of letting them gestate in your mind. Ihen you go all alone, sit, maybe type out a first line and then the poem fall into place fiom there where you are balancing craft and instinct... Yes, and now days, encountering a metaphor, No—you know, been there, done that. I see, so if it ’s a clichéd metaphor... 351 Right, or even stale for me. Even not cliche'd for anybody else but stale for me or “Yeah, you’ve tried that. Go somewhere else.” So there’s a negotiation with myself through that process too. There ’s a couple interesting things that come out of this too. So you need to be alone and think through this and yet you ’re not really alone because you’ve got audience, right? So how does that being alone but yet you ’re thinking: avoid cliché, use craft, how is this going to fit with an audience. I’m not thinking about that. I want to avoid cliche, not for them but for me, because I want to get to the integrity of the statement. Because there’s something exhilarating about getting to a statement that’s real instead of fake, or canned, and not so that I can say “Look what I did!” You know, nobody gives a firck about poetry, maybe five people do. It’s because I want to get to the end and go, “Oh my God, that’s real.” So the audience is yourself but you ’re not writing to yourself in a sentimental way, you’re really... it’s almost as though the audience is the poem itself Yes, that’s right. And getting it right. There are very few opportunities in life to get it right and that’s a place where you can. How do you know when you’ve gotten it right? 352 The top of your head comes off, right? It just feels true. And then you go back and you go, “Oh, that’s where I started being good old me rather than attending to the wisdom of the poem. Let me shift that.” So you might have that feeling but then you’ve got to go back Then you’ve got to go back and say, “Does all of this live up to the integrity of that feeling?” And it doesn ’t always do that. No. So the feeling can mislead you in a way. Yes, you can get carried away. You’ve got the energy and the you need to balance that with the other side right? Yes. The editor '3 eye. 353 Yes, but I don’t think the editor has to be cold. I think the editor has to be...I’m thinking of how I edit other people’s work: “Ok, but what’s next? What’s next?” Con has this poem called “Mexico, Waiting for the Gas” and it’s about. . .they lived in Mexico and when the gas dries up you have to call and they come with this big hose and deliver it and he described it and it was kind of interesting but my question was, “Ok, now what?” and I think I now-whated him through maybe three versions of the poem until by the end he’s waiting for. . .he’s in a dark room waiting for his own face to come up through the developer and it reminds him of the mummies in Guanajuato in Mexico that you can get right up close to, they found them just in the sand, and they’re writhing, they’re not peacefirl and the end up the poem is “I suppose the mummies of Guanajuato, they too could be said to wait.” And so this waiting becomes resurrective almost, scary, and about a mysterious self rising up that you never expected. That is exciting. The fucking gas isn’t that exciting. It’s only exciting because it gets you someplace. Because it got you someplace! And so he felt something there but was cutting it short. Yes, and Con will say in class “I get it written, I get it set, and then I’m like, Ok I’m done.” Then I come along and say, “Wait a minute, what now?” And I think we have to do that for ourselves too. I mean he does that for me. I think that’s what a good editor can 354 do for us and if we’ve got the guts we do it for ourselves. We can look at the end and we know, you know when you’re opting out, or when you’re doing the cute thing. I have a friend, Horach Alilai, and he said, “Too many of your poems end like they’re sonnets. Like there’s this couplet, bling! Quit doing that and see what happens.” And it really revolutionized my work because I quit going for the flourish, quit saving up for the flourish. When you rob yourself of some habit. . .in the advanced poetry that I teach a lot of what I do is rob them of the habitual. So whatever you tended to do, stop doing it. It’s terrifying! Think about if you had to stop being habitual in your life. Habit is everything. It’s how we get through a day. Maybe a good day of writing is when I stop being habitual. And it’s like you experience everything for the first time. Because habit basically makes you turn into a repeat. A repeat, a robot. “1 break a line here because that’s where I break lines. My poems are this wide.” Well what if my poems get this wide? What if I turn the page like this? That’s what D.A. Powell did. A great writer, “Cocktails,” his great book. He took the page and turned it on the side and started writing in heroic couplets, wide Whitman-like lines. It changed everything. It’s whatever rattles your chain. And the thing is you have to keep doing it. There’s no resting place. There’s no: “Ok, I’ve arrived.” You know, with musicians, think about musicians, when they get somewhere and say, “That’s howl sound.” It gets hideous. “I’m Springsteen. I write for the working class.” Even though you’re a fucking billionaire? So there’s no place to stop. 355 So you ’re constantly... it ’s paradoxical right? You ’re trying to reach the horizon but you know you’ll never get there and it’s in the search, it’s in the process. And you get there and maybe you spend a day and then there’s the next one. Yes, you just can’t rest on your laurels or it gets stale. And what you might risk then is...so you’ve got, even with Springsteen, he’s going to hit a moment of popularity where all of a sudden he’s connecting with an audience... ...and everybody wants you to keep doing it. And then, if you move away from that, your popularity could drop but that ’s the only way to keep going. I’m kind of known as edgy and sexy and last summer I interviewed my mom who’s eighty about her upbringing in Edwardsburg Michigan. Weird fucking little village. To me, that’s creepy. And I wrote poems from those interviews. Well, that’s not my freaky, sexy self and people were like why? I wrote forty poems, they’ve been taken a lot of places, and I think they are edgy. You’re constantly unseeding your little source of popularity. I had people back when I was an undergrad saying, “Why did you stop writing Monster Woman? She was cool.” Yeah, but after a couple Monster Woman poems it’s been there, done that. Then you’re just self-imitating. That’s what I meant by frustrating. If you’re really true to it, it’s never a place where you can say. . .it’s sort of 356 like housework, you can never arrive. It’s clean for a day and it looks pretty and then it’s messy again. You want to keep it messy. I know when you talk about you ’re students you’re having them imitate. How does that work with you? Those aren’t strict imitations right? Gerald Stern has had a very big impact on me in the last couple of years. By emulating just the length of his poems. . .he’s gotten real short, like sonnet-ish, and real odd endings where suddenly it just stops and you’re like “nothing’s resolved, where did we get to?” And this kind of narrativity that’s not linear and I think I’ve imitated him quite a bit as a way of integrating some of that stuff into my own work because I think he was a great antidote for my tendency toward over-narrativising. So when I read somebody who really rocks my boat I want to, not ape them, but integrate the thing that I see there that I think, “Oh I need to try that.” Diane Wakoski talks about reinventing ideal poems as your own. What you ’re talking about is maybe you will see something an author does and say, “I could use that” but you ’11 never... if you read something of yours against something you ’ve pulled fiom you’re not going to be able to say, “Oh of course she got it fiom here. ” No. The experience is mine, the voice—whatever that is—is mine, the body. . .that’s a part we haven’t really talked about but, you know, I think so much of poems are bodies and poems mirror the body, that’s mine. But just some strategy that’s unsettling to me. 357 Not to end big. To fiagment in ways that I’ve never done before. What are the possibilities of fi'agmentation? Wow, that opens a new door. So it’s less “I want to be like Gerald Stern” then “What if I fragment, what door does that open for the thing that I do, and the way that I do line?” So what do you mean by “the poems are like the body? ” Yeah, that’s a hard one. Well first of all, they have a physicality. They register before you even read it. It looks a certain way. A line is a kind of. . .it has heft or air. And that reminds me, Nick F linn—have you read some of? No. He does autobiographical stuff but. . .he had a series “Fragments found inside my mother’s body.” Wow, you know? What if you think of autobiography not as this thing that happened but this absolute invention, an invented poem that he constructs, he imagines being found inside of his suicided mother’s dead body? That’s a whole other approach to telling somebody’s story. It’s an extraordinarily inventive place to go. You know? Wow. It’s a new place to start from. 358 It’s a new place to start from and you look at one of his poems and it’s like somebody’s taken a rake—I call it aerated. You know how a lot of poems, if you look in a literary magazine, they’re really chunky and sewagey looking, they look very composty, thick. You look at one of his poems and there’s a lot of white space, a lot of air, so if I throw Nick Flinn out, his thing out, but for myself: Where’s my white space? What if I encounter that? What’s in those silences? That’s what I mean. Ok, so back to the body. If you think about the experience of making poems with the freshness we are talking about, that at its best the way we live in our bodies can have that same freshness. That every day I’m reinvented rather than habitual. There’s a parallel I think between how we inhabit this [pointing to self] and how the intangibles work their way into the physicality of the poem. I don’t think I’m very good at talking about it yet. Well is it anything related to...one of the things is that you have a relationship to the poem. So Bill Olsen, his idea is that you ’re more like a midwife, and Wakoski calls her poems her children, Kerlikowske thought there were intrinsic being in their own right. But you are talking about the way you live on the page is a correlation to the way you live in your own body. In your own skin. I don’t think of them as my own children or as a midwifery. I’m trying to think of a different. . .I don’t know. That seems creepy. When they ’re finished, are they something else? 359 Yes. So they are something else that you ’ve created. They’re no longer a part of you, or are they? I have to revise within a pretty tight window of time. Or else I feel like, “I don’t know what I meant.” It’s like Star Trek, whatever that window is it has been sealed off. I don’ know. I’m suddenly not liking the mystical, the over-mystical description of it all because I think it is imagination, intellect, the way we are in our bodies, just a certain style of thought and feeling but I don’t think of them as babies going out into the world. Yeah, that’s creepy. It is! I’m not sure why. Maybe because I have a real one. I don’t know, that’s very gendered. Does a man say that? Well Olsen said it’s more like a midwife. It’s still a process of that creation. It’s not that he’s birthing it but he’s kind of helping it come into existence. It is something else and he ’s helping it come along and when it’s done it’s still something else, it ’s not necessarily all of his genes and genetic makeup. Con Hillberry again, I picture him being like, “Oh it’s just a poem.” 360 Yeah, that’s also helpfid. You ’re jumping back and forth between that sort of mystical take to: “You know what, it ’s just words on a page. ” It’s just a poem and it’s going to be ash. I think what’s most important about it is the actual doing of it, the process. That once it’s done I don’t think it’s. . .Con has gone so far as to say “Poems don’t save anybody. Poems are less important that people.” You know, maybe bigger names than me feel like they’re going to go out into the world and make change but I think the most important thing is the doing. So why the push for publication and how does that reinforce the invention, does it? I’m not a big self-promoter. I send things out, but not relentlessly. Partly because it helps me keep my job because we’re supposed to publish but, you know, it’s cool, kind of like winning a five-dollar lottery ticket. It’s cool if somebody writes me and says, “I read your stuff on Blackbird or in Georgia Review. There is something to the endpoint that the poem got to. That somebody can read it and go, “Man.” That’s cool but that may be the least interesting thing about it. I think we’ve talked to this a little, but how would you describe what writing gives back to you and why you keep coming back to it? My interest is also what it gives back to you also feeds back into why you continue to invent. 361 Well I’d probably be curtains if I didn’t have writing because it’s been the most consistent thing in my life, it’s sort of like Scarlet O’Hara: “We’ll always have...” “Tomorrow’s another day. ” “Tomorrow’s another day, we’ll always be writers.” It’s the great leveler in a lot of ways. I get divorced, my kid’s an addict, whatever. I’m a writer and it’s how I see. I always can respond to whatever it is. You know, Clifton has that line, “Every day something has tried to kill me and has failed.” I think poems push back against that bulldozer. Con’s wife died recently and we were sitting together over lunch and I sort of said, “But poems are cool” and he’s like “Yep.” That’s a good anecdote. I think of the shit I’ve written my way through. Billy Collins has that essay “My Grandfather’s Tackle Box” in which he sort of says autobiography isn’t enough, if you want to go write a memoir, write a memoir, write an email, write in a journal but leave me alone. And I think that’s true in a lot of ways. I think there’s a certain. . .I don’t think raw experience is enough but having. . .being able to make. . .there’s a book by Gregory Ore called “Poetry Is Survival” you know he shot his brother by accident when he was a kid and it’s all about poetry and trauma and he says. . .he has sort of a template: there’s rant, and there’s journal, and there’s poetry. Poetry is the last stop on the subway and it’s the most aestheticized. And you make the craft a Graecian Barn and it sets on your 362 mantle and there it is. Existentially, it’s a great fighting back against pain, chaos, whatever. And it’s beautiful besides. You know Keats has this last thing they think he wrote called “Late Fragment” or “This Living Hand” and he basically says, it’s a few lines, and he’s like: “Some day you’re going to read this poem and you’re going to love it so much that you’re going to want to give me your blood so I can live again.” And the end is: “Here, I hold it toward you.” Whitman did the same thing but just took a lot longer to say it, but “I’m waiting for you.” So there’s a feeling of companionship with the dead, I mean that’s the other part I haven’t said but my dad died when I was seven, lost a lot of people. Poetry doesn’t acknowledge the boundary between the living and the dead, it communicates daily with the dead and so it’s a way of keeping that dialogue open and of always talking back to experience. Keats, on his death bed, is still saying “You’re going to want to give me your blood because of the seduction of my work. Here, I’m holding my hand out to you, future reader, whoever the hell you are.” Whitman the same except he’s fiiendlier and in my way the same. You know, it’s fierce. It helps you live your life. It helps me live my life. It puts things into some sort of order. It responds to what happened. You can’t ever lose it. Nope, there it is. I mean it’s prayer, it’s just prayers for the blasphemous. 363 Prayers for the blasphemous, that’s a good line right there. T hat ’s fantastic. I have a couple more questions that relate more to teaching. Do you believe that you can teach someone to be a poet? I think the question really is, what aspects can be taught and what cannot be taught? I think you can teach someone to write poems. There’s a difference. I’m always worried when a student says to me: “I’m a poet.” I don’t claim that. My mentor doesn’t claim that and he deserves to. That’s like I’m inhabiting an identity rather than doing something. I think most people can write poems, some better than others. Better by whatever standards. But I think for some people to get out a little litany with every line beginning with “I remember” is a big achievement. Most of the students I’ve taught have wound up somewhere pretty amazing. So yeah, I think with attention, with a lot of reading, with a lot of workshop and interaction with readers, yes, I think people can learn to create poems. So they can learn if they want to learn but you can’t teach them. Is that what you ’re saying? I’m a good guide but I can’t teach them. But you can teach craft. 364 Yes, and I can give them opportunities to go out to Maxim Plains and meet their maker too. So you can help stimulate their imaginations, stimulate their energy. Yes, and give them reasons to want to be scared. I talk a lot about that philosophy of Dwende. Do you know about that? No. Lorca, the Spanish poet kind of . . .the Dwende was like a little dude like in Spanish folklore and he was like Coyote in Native American myth. He would come along and rattle your choke chains and he’d make you fall. I fell a couple years ago and shattered my ankle and leg. I have this actually [necklace around her neck] it was in my leg holding my bones together. And I had had a dream a few nights before where I was walking under the telephone, the power lines I ended up under when I fell, it was on black ice, and there was a bat, in the dream, a bat hanging there and I could see through its wings like blood and it had this little snicker on its face and that’s the Dwende. The Dwende is like “You’re going to break your ass, what are you going to do with it?” I talk a lot about. . .that was his philosophy of art, that trouble is interesting, that inspiration doesn’t come from the angels but fi'om the dirt right up through the soles of your feet and the thing that you’ve got to get in touch with as an artist is that sort of dark fierceness. His 365 line is: “All that has dark sounds has Dwende.” So I can give them that, opportunities for feeling that but the walking through it is theirs. How do you give them that? Do you say, “Try going to Drummond Island and do this” or put them into uncomfortable places? I am a real assignment-driven teacher. I set up uncomfortable assignments. I do a lot with randomness, with time limitation, with “you have eight lines and these emblematic words that you’ve chosen, write a poem in eight minutes.” As they get better, as they grow, we read D.A. Powell, who’s dying of AIDS, who’s writing this way and then I ask them to turn the paper sideways and see what happens if they fill a page with lines of that width. So a lot of it is stuff that I ask them to do structurally which makes them uncomfortable. Then by the end of the process I have them commit to a ten-week project of their own design and what’s uncomfortable about that is that we think we live from poem to poem—inspiration you know, “Oh, I’ll write about those flowers, they look lovely and now I’ll write about that hummingbird”—well, when you commit to ten weeks of sonnets, that’ll fucking kill you but you have to stay with it because you’ve made that commitment. So these are the same types of things you would do to yourself then. Yes, I make projects for myself all the time. To commit to more than one poem. I don’t live poem to poem, life is too complicated for that. I say this summer I’m working on X 366 and even something as banal as I’m going to write poems that are twelve lines or less all summer because I’ve been writing long, rich, clunky things—I’m sick of it. What happens if I limit myself? So form then becomes a process of invention too then? Yes, because you have to rise up to it. So does the form then give the content? Because before you were talking about content comes first, then you are putting on the page and seeing where it goes. I don’t think it’s one or the other. I think they’re hand in hand. Here’s the first thing I ever have my students do, so say you are one of my students, so I hand you this [digs into her bag and gives me a small, decorative change-purse] and I say write a five-line autobiography and this has to be in every line. You name it and you tell me the story of your life in five lines with that in every line. Well that’s a ridiculous assignment, and you know what? They’re brilliant at it. Limitation is creative. So you need the form in order to gain the content. Right, that’s why in high school when their creative writing teacher comes and says, “I want you to go and write a poem about nature”—what’s that? 367 It’s so open-ended that it cuts the process. That’s right. And the same thing happens when you say, “Oh it ’s poetry, whatever you want to write is fine. 1) Worse thing you can do to somebody. No. Go outdoors and find a walnut and crack it open and look inside of it and taste it and then put yourself inside of there and write on the walls in side-lines, then maybe that will be interesting. That’s a great prompt. So it’s setting people up to have to invent. And you ’re scafl'olding a moment. Yes. I know that works because I’ve been doing it so long and it works. And that’s why I say anybody can do it. I teach support staff at K [Kalamazoo College]. I do writing workshops sometimes with people who maybe did high school, who don’t consider themselves writers of any kind. They’re amazing. [phone call interruption] 368 This current aligning of universities with poets. Is that something you see as a positive trend or? It depends on how we do it. I think the MFA-izing of poetry is kind of dangerous. There’s too much of it? Well there’s a lot of it and I mean it’s cool that everybody wants to write and a lot of it is good but that kind of, what is it? Commodification? Yeah, and sort of churning out the. . .and then everybody with this degree that’s supposed to get them somewhere but it won’t get them anywhere. And seeing poetry as primarily belonging in academia. I think that’s why slam and spoken word has been refreshing in a lot of ways. I’m not crazy about a lot of the stuff but I think that scene has been really liberating for a lot of people to say “You know, poetry belongs in bars and in town hall and in the middle of the cafeteria.” I think if we could sort of bring together that part of spoken word with poems that are more. . .I actually had a student this year, Aaron Coleman, who’s a really good spoken word artist who decided to hunker down and write poems on the page. Boy it was really a struggle for him. 369 They are two different things. And he’s gotten really habitual with the hand thing and the way he was in his body when he did poems, everything. It was almost like tying his hands to ask him to sit down and belong to the page for ten weeks. He did it, and I think it made both parts of him stronger. I worry about it becoming rarefied, sort of living in the rarefied air of academia rather than in the public circle. It ’s just hard to find successful poets who aren’t in academia. So academia has had to open its doors a little too then right? Right. I’m from a really working class background. I don’t have an MFA. I didn’t do it on purpose. I have an MSW, was a shrink for a while, that’s why I can’t ever be tenured even I’ve been there for nine-thousand years because I don’t have that stupid degree. But yeah, I think it’s important to bring in people who have other. . .you know Billy Collins is probably our most famous poet making the most money and I mean he’s independently wealthy so he speaks from a particular vantage point. That’s his, that’s ok but there are a lot of other vantage points to choose from. Well Ted Kooser, right, he worked insurance. Right. 370 But that ’s still unusual. Yes it is, more now than ever before. I think there’s some who happen to be really dedicated teachers as well as dedicated to writing but of course you are splitting yourself in half, but to me they feed each other. But a lot of people who are teaching it are teaching it so that they can write it. The whole culture that I came up in. . .you know you would go to writer’s conferences and it was just like debauchery. It was so gross. All these old farts hitting on fifteen-year-olds, it was just really gross and it turned me off to the scene. I don’t go to AWP, the scene, the self-promotion part of being a poet I’m not interested in. I’m interested in reserving my energy for the page and for my students. But everybody’s different that way. I do worry about it becoming habitual in the academic sense, you know. This is what a poem looks like, this is what a poem is, everybody writes like Jory Grahm who goes to Iowa. Ugh, that worries me. So you see teaching then influencing positively your poetry and vice versa. Oh yeah, yes. Time-wise it’s tough. I’d probably write a lot more if I wasn’t teaching but to me. . .you know that exercise where I give the student the object and they write their autobiography? Well I give them one, and let’s say I gave you that one. And I ask them to smell it, touch it, get to know it for a few minutes and then they are all attached to it and I say give it away. So before they write they end up with a different one and that’s the one they end up having to write about. Well, that’s my first lesson in that story: that writing isn’t just about your little lair, it’s also about giving it away, constantly giving it away, 371 giving away the ego, giving away the resolution, and giving it away to other people who are coming up. I have a poem and the spider sort of speaks and she says “Hey, down the lane there’s a girl who doesn’t know what a spoon is for. Go and teach her what a spoon is for.” And I think that’s the service part of what we do. 372 Works Cited Anzaldua, Gloria. 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