I always thought that I had to be in a certain frame of mind to write, that the poem in a way needed to be finished and polished before I could start to set it down. Much too anal and controlling. So I started writing less and less, of course, through the nineties. Then I had a conversation with a favorite poet of mine, Eric Ormsby, who told me that he had gone through a long dry spell and that the way he got writing again was to allow himself to write what he called “baby talk,” you know, the sort of drivel that you’re embarrassed to see come out of you. I couldn’t imagine anything like baby talk coming out of Ormsby, but the thought was all the more reassuring. And so the idea is, you let yourself write lots of it! And it’s okay because you just throw it out. But in the mean time, you’re limbering up. And of course in any case something usually comes of it, the drivel starts to fold into some line of thought, a nuance, the scent of something, and away you go.
On Writing, with Jeffery Donaldson | Open Book: Ontario
