Montag: (Q12) Let's talk about how you shape your poems. Would you describe how you build your poems, about the logistics of putting the parts and pieces together, how you arrive finally at the effect you want to achieve?
Benet: You ask a hard question when you ask me how I shape my poems. If I were a sculptor, I could probably tell you something about how the stone catches my attention in the ways in which it obscures and conceals the life inside it, and how by chipping away at it with this tool or that, I help free its heart, or soul, or former life, or what have you.
But the truth is that I am not quite sure how I shape my poems. Each poem finds its boundaries through different methods. Sometimes the poem is lurking in my consciousness, just waiting to be transcribed. Other times, there are these phrases wandering around, aimless but desperate to belong, or to find a home in a text. They want to in-sense themselves....
But mostly it is an image that arrests me (or my attention, rather). Then the hard work starts: the mixing of words, the scarping away of the blobs of thickened phrases, the layering of more words to bring out a new hue, or the diluting of some brash and bold stroke that might be out of place in this picture. In other words, just plain drudgery until it seems to me that the image the words make approximate the image of the world that spoke to me in the first place.
Rarely do I start (or even finish) by going for effect in my poems. The effect is always, well, the effect of the work - and not the engine of the primary shaping force.
Montag: (Q13) I find four ways that you arrive at these poem, and I'd like you to respond to my sense of them: First, it's "I know what this is and I search it for meaning." You start with a general statement or insight and follow it with the particulars that support it, or with an incident or an item that sparks lines about how it is like something else. ("Recursion," p. 78, might be an example.) Second, it's "This builds to what it means; meaning emerges at the end." Particulars lead to a general statement or insight – details accrue to meaning. ("Incident," p. 24, or "Ecologue, Minor," p. 25, might be examples. And "Disenthrallment," p. 64, is an excellent example of this.) Third, it's "This is what it is." You arrange the particulars pretty much without comment, and the poetry is in their relation to one another. ("Performance," p. 34, or "Blood from Stone," p. 35, would be examples. The third part of "Triptych: Crossings" is another example.) Finally, there is the approach which uses a combination of the three previous shapes. For instance, "California Littoral" starts with generalization, but in the end particulars speak for themselves, i.e. the microwave bobbing on the waves. So how accurate is this as a description of the ways your poems are put together?
Benet: Wow... I like the way you broke down the rhetorical thrust of my poems. I wasn’t aware of these structures. I am glad that for you, as the reader, they cohere in these structures, but I can tell you, not one of them was written with a conscious decision that involved something like, "I think I’ll write poem in which "I know what this is and I search it for meaning...."
Maybe because I used to write essays, copy, and technical manuals, I have acquired a pretty fancy toolset of forms of argument and rhetorical devices, so when it comes to writing poems, I just reach into this box without even knowing it....
On the other hand, because I believe that a poem gains its final shape and meaning (its resonance) with the reader (that is, in an exchange, or communicative act), the ways you identify as my various approaches in these poems tell as much about the way you come to poetry as they do about my making it in these poems...
Continued at BENET INTERVIEW - 6 below
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