Toward Poetry

“What poetry have you read that makes you feel that you want to write poetry?” Because usually what draws us toward poetry is the individual voice that we want to hear—the voice of Wordsworth, the voice of Keats, James Merrill, Anthony Hecht, whoever it is. The chances are that a person who doesn’t feel any desire to hear such voices may not turn out to have a very original voice himself.

SHAWN

So you do in a way agree with the academic writers who always seem to imply that the parents of poems are other poems, as opposed to what I’m always wondering, which is why couldn’t the greatest influences on a poet be the people he’s known, or the experiences he’s had every day, rather than the poems he’s read?

STRAND

Well, it all depends on the poetry you write. Some people may be more influenced by their mothers and less influenced by Robert Frost. It differs with different poets. But by and large, I think poets are more influenced by other poems than they are by what they eat and whom they talk to—because they read other poems deeply, and sometimes they don’t eat dinner deeply or chat with a friend over the telephone deeply. Because poems not only demand patience, they demand a kind of surrender. You must give yourself up to them. Once you’ve done that, and allowed them to enter into your system, of course they’re going to be more influential. This is the real food for a poet: other poems, not meat loaf.

SHAWN

But what about the idea that a poet should be influenced by a wide range of experience, that a poet should explore life and allow it to affect him? Don’t you have any feeling that you should do everything, at least once?

STRAND

I don’t have to try everything on the menu to know what it is that I like. I can make a reasonable guess as to what I might like, and so that’s what I will order. I don’t go out of my way to experience every possible thing, because that’s dangerous. I want to protect myself. I want not to experience many, many different things, but to experience the things I choose to experience well, and deeply.

SHAWN

Some writers, for example, have tried to enhance their work by writing under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

STRAND

They interfere. I mean, if I’ve had a couple of drinks, I don’t feel like writing. I feel like having another drink. Or I feel like going to sleep.

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