Poets writing about their poems

In "Don't ask me what I mean" (Picador, 2003), a collection of articles by poets about their books, Billy Collins wrote "Performing an act of literary criticism on your own work is a little like do-it-yourself dentistry: a sloppy affair at best, not to mention the pain involved for writer and reader alike".

This feeling seems common. Poets, even (especially?) confessional ones, aren't often open about the craft of their poems. Ask them why a poem's stanzas have 6 short lines (rather than 3 longer ones), or ask them which poems wouldn't be in their book were it 10 pages shorter, and see what happens. More daringly, ask them if that middle stanza is really earning its keep, or whether the obscurity is necessary, or whether the self-imposed requirement to make the poem a sonnet really justifies all that padding.

I can understand why poets are defensive - there's little to gain, and some questions of that ilk don't have useful answers - maybe on another day the stanzas might have been 3-lined, maybe the poem wasn't written for people like the questioner. On the other hand, there might be aspects that the poet wants to advertise - perhaps devices are used that aren't obvious on a first reading.

I've seen some poets open up -

• At the end of Best American Poetry (BAP) and Best British Poetry anthologies, poets sometimes write usefully about how their poem ended up the way it did. Often though, they cloud the issue, describing what they've done without convincingly explaining why -
  • 'Shattered Sonnets' that sort of simultaneously distort, discard, and highlight formal, thematic, and rhetorical sonnet conventions (Olena Kalytiak Davis, BAP 2000)
  • I deliberately ended the first four stanzas with '-ing', which is a kind of cheater's rhyme, and the last two with the imperfect rhyme of 'combat' and 'scratch.' I threw in 'protest' and 'trust' near the end, for fun. Between the cheating, the imperfection, and the distance between rhymes, I hope that the poem reads as free verse, yet looks formal because of the tercets. The combination of the free and constrained, of modern and traditional, seemed suited to the subject, writing to and from the canon (Adrienne Su, BAP 2000)
  • The poem was a liberation to write, technically speaking; though it rhymes, the rhyme scheme changes every stanza, and the meter is deliberately clunky (Mary Jo Salter, BAP 2000)
  • Of course, what I intended is irrelevant. I had hoped to play with metaphors for the artist's relationship to a life of service in places of political or natural power. The couplet form seemed intimate ... I had given myself an assignment to count numbers of words per lines, and to make rapid shifts in types of reality (Brenda Hillan, BAP 2000)
  • Once I chose that first line of the poem, the mystery, magic, and music of poetic language took over, and I rode it like a musician rides a melody, or a surfer rides a wave. It was a wonderful experience (Quincy Troupe, BAP 2000)
• Jonathan Edwards often writes informatively about his poems, most interestingly in his article about How to renovate a Morris Minor, taking us through earlier drafts (it's easier to be objective about drafts than about final versions).
• Kona MacPhee wrote an excellent "Companion" booklet for her "Perfect Blue" poetry book, which was online for a while.
• I added a web site for my poetry booklet at litrefsmovingparts.blogspot.com