From the current (Oct/Nov '05) AWP Writer's Chronicle, in an interview with Rita Dove by Elizabeth Alexander:
Alexander: Your books are all so beautifully sectioned. How can you see that you have more than one thing that goes together and not just a bunch of stray hairs?
Dove: I actually put piles of poems on the floor and walk around them, asking: "Do you want to be over there? You want to be in that group?" I talk to them. I listen to them and then--
Alexander: They get up and go?
Dove: Yes. They edge over there, you nudge one next to another. It's quite a physical thing, isn't it? They really have to want to go together. And build their power from each other.
4 comments:
Thanks for posting this. Both Alexander and Dove are among my favorites. What a marvelous pairing of 'old' and 'new'.
Beautiful.
That's a self-compliment though, too, since that's my method. Virtually doesn't work for me. I need the real thing, a tangible representation of my manuscript. It is, after all, called a manuscript.
Hope all's well.
I also handle the pages, when I'm putting together a manuscript. I don't talk to the poems, exactly, but I do read them out loud. Reading them out loud helps when I'm listening for the contrasts of tone and mood.
I listen for the quality of the silence before and after each of the poems. That sometimes tells me as much as the poems themselves do.
HA! That's so goofy! I love it. Thank you for posting it.
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