Dara Wier interview
Is it a question of confidence, too?
After you do it enough times, write enough poems, you realize that it is the fact of sitting down and doing it, of writing, that makes it possible for you to be there to get the really good thing next, instead of expecting that you’re not going to get inspired.
If you only sit down when you are, you’re not going to write very many poems.
Oh, that would be awful. I mean, that’s one baby step up from only sitting down to write a poem when you are depressed. Of course, there’s no way of knowing that you are going to do it or not. And I make mistakes. Sometimes I go off on a whole launch of something that’s completely wasted and I know it in the end. And sometimes I’ll maybe work on something and start getting an inkling and it’s somewhere and oh, those four lines, now that’s really something. Maybe tomorrow I’ll start with that and go from there. And that tends to help. I don’t think you can be an occasional writer and get too much satisfaction out of it. Because then when you get it, you really think it’s just luck. You believe you were struck by lightning or whatever. I don’t in any way mean that hard work alone is going to do it. But I think you’ve got to practice the craft, be in poetry, stay there.
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And all these things in your life, between teaching and being in a community of writers and having so much of your life centered around poetry, must help.
I think it does. But also I don’t think you go around talking about it all the time. We were talking about the Van Gogh letters earlier. He’s got a beautiful letter where he writes—and I guess he’s living with his parents at this point and they’ve about had it with him—and he writes about how he wants to go live where there are other artists around. He says he has to be able to be with other people who are doing the work he wants to do—both as models, and as people who are sharing the same kinds of problems. So, I liked it when I got to that part of the letter. I thought, “Oh, that makes sense. That’s what goes on here.” That’s what goes on. It’s not a school for poets. Look at us. We’re not freaks. We’re human beings who have families and who don’t, or do other things and have passionate interests in fishing, in politics, or whatever it is that people do. It’s just good to realize you’re not a freak. Or that we’re all freaks.
From an interview with Dara Wier, conducted by Matthew Zapruder
Both writers are part of this year’s Juniper Summer Writing Institute.
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