“For me, intuitive thinking means associative thinking; intuition causes us to introduce narrative or figurative elements into a poem before we're able to explain why those elements belong.” ThinkingMeanAbleCausesElementsIntuitionNarrativeIntroducingIntuitive Author:James Arthur
“Memorizing the work of others definitely made me a better writer.” MadeMemorizing Author:James Arthur
“When I started reciting my own poems in public, I worried that it would seem too theatrical, but now I find recitation very natural, because it allows me to address audiences directly.” SeemsNaturalMy OwnAudienceWorriedAddressesTheatricalRecitingRecitation Author:James Arthur
“When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art.” WayGivingWritingArtActorsAudiencePoetPerformancesSingersNot InterestedReadership Author:James Arthur
“In my case, performance is part of the medium. Sometimes I feel that it's my main medium, and that the presentation of my poems on the page is secondary.” FeelsSometimesCasesPagesPerformancesMediumsPresentation Author:James Arthur
“I often write from memory by walking around and talking to myself. Even when I'm working at a computer I write out loud, so that I can hear the poem's rhythm.” WritingI CanMemoriesTalkingWalkingComputerRhythmLoud Author:James Arthur
“And treating poetry as a performing art emphasizes its ephemerality. A printed poem can be endlessly reprinted, photocopied, scanned, uploaded, cut and pasted - but a performance, even if somebody's there with a video camera, is one time only: the audience experiences something that won't exist when the performance is over, and which won't ever be reproduced in exactly the same form. I find that appealing.” IfsArtFormAudienceCuttingPerformancesCamerasVideoPerformingOne TimePrintedPerforming ArtsVideo Cameras Author:James Arthur
“It's not realistic to imagine that any poem will last forever. Our species won't last forever! We try to capture and preserve our impressions of reality because it's all going away: everything we think and remember, everything we've ever felt, everyone we love.” ThinkingTryingRealityLastsRememberFeltForeverImagineSpeciesImpressionPreservesGoing AwayCaptureRealisticImagine ThatRemembers Everything Author:James Arthur
“Poetry isn't an efficient tool for preserving experience, any more than it's an efficient mode of communication, but who says that it should be efficient?” ShouldCommunicationToolsPoetry IsEfficient Author:James Arthur
“For me, poetry is a way of thinking, and like many poets, I'm driven by the idea of trying to find the impossible, perfect words: the words that will hold my subject.” ThinkingWayTryingIdeasPerfectImpossibleSubjectsPoetDrivenPoetry IsWay Of Thinking Author:James Arthur
“I don't see why a poem couldn't be spoken out a car window or written on the beach at low tide. In fact, I'm sure people are doing it.” PeopleFactsWrittenCarLowsWindowBeachTides Author:James Arthur
“If art doesn't require an audience, can an intimate conversation be a work of art? Can a thought be a work of art? Maybe. I don't know. These questions are completely hypothetical for me, because I love interacting with audiences. I want my poems to be heard.” IfsKnowsWantArtAudienceHeardConversationIntimateWorks Of ArtInteractingHypotheticalIntimate Conversation Author:James Arthur
“It makes sense to me that the polyglot wouldn't know what language he dreamed in.” KnowsLanguageMake SensePolyglots Author:James Arthur
“When I'm most deeply involved in my writing, sometimes I do dream about poetry, and occasionally I wake up from a dream with a phrase that I like well enough to put it in a poem.” WritingWellsSometimesEnoughDreamInvolvedWake UpPhrases Author:James Arthur
“Years ago I used to set my alarm for 4 am, so that I could wake up in the middle of a dream and move directly into writing. I guess my favorite poems contain a mixture of intuitive and analytical thought.” WritingYearsDreamMovingUsedMiddleYears AgoWake UpMy FavoriteIntuitiveMixturesAlarms Author:James Arthur
“Our analytical faculties allow us to look critically at our writing and interpret it. Sometimes we make bold, impulsive edits to our poems, but most forms of precision and economy in poetry, it seems to me, are signatures of the analytical mind.” WritingMindLooksSometimesSeemsFormEconomyFacultyEditsPrecisionSignaturesImpulsive Author:James Arthur
“I don't think I'd ever get any better as a poet if I didn't push myself, very deliberately, to grow. My best poems surprise me, as they should, but I fight them at every turn, possibly just because I'm stubborn.” IfsThinkingShouldTurnsFightingGrowsPoetSurpriseStubbornSurprise MeBest Poem Author:James Arthur
“I try not to think in terms of what poems or poets should do. Most of us appreciate a wide diversity in music, in cooking, in movies, but in our own medium, poetry, we often fail to make allowances for tastes and projects other than our own.” ThinkingShouldTryingTermFailingPoetTasteDiversityProjectsAppreciateCookingWideMediumsAllowance Author:James Arthur
“If poems very different from my own bring pleasure to a group of readers, who am I to say that the poems should have been written differently?” IfsShouldHas BeensDifferentMy OwnPleasureWrittenGroupsReaderShould HaveShould Have Been Author:James Arthur
“I like poems that immediately claim my attention, instead of taking my attention for granted. At first read, I want to feel compelled to pick up the poem again; I want to be curious about its byways and secret corners.” WantFeelsFirstsSecretAttentionPicksClaimsCornersCuriousGrantedCompelled Author:James Arthur
“I like poems that affect me emotionally and also provoke me to further, deeper thought. I enjoy challenge, but not, I think, for its own sake.” ThinkingEnjoyChallengesSakeDeeperProvoking Author:James Arthur
“Maybe because I can't even put together an IKEA desk, I've never been tempted to think of my own poems as built objects - but I do sometimes imagine them as mathematical constructs.” ThinkingI CanSometimesTogetherMy OwnImagineObjectsBuiltMathematicalDesksConstructsTemptedBecause I CanIkea Author:James Arthur
“My dad, a mathematician, raised me to believe that mathematics is beautiful, so math is a part of my imaginative terrain. In my late 20s I wrote several 11-line poems because I wanted to create poems that couldn't be uniformly divided into couplets, tercets, or quatrains, 11 being a prime number.” BelieveWantedBeautifulLinesNumbersDadLateMathematicsRaisedMy DadMathPrimeDividedMathematicianImaginativeTerrainPrime NumbersCouplets Author:James Arthur
“As a species, we create tools to control our environment. What excites my imagination is wilderness: our materials' ability to escape our control.” ImaginationAbilityEnvironmentMaterialsToolsSpeciesWildernessMy ImaginationOur Environment Author:James Arthur
“I do consider myself Canadian, but I feel American, too. I've spent more than fifteen years in each of the two countries, so really I just think of myself as a dual citizen, which is what I am. Thankfully, I've never been forced to choose!” ThinkingCountry Author:James Arthur
“It's true, there aren't many explicit references to Canada in my book. And not many explicit references to the U.S., either. I try to fill my poems with enough real, observed detail that the poems create a believable world - but I don't write poems for the sake of telling my own story. My life is not important or interesting enough to warrant that kind of documentary. Instead I try to use my experience as a way of understanding situations that are common to many people. I want readers to project their own lives onto my poems.” PeopleWorldWritingTryingKindImportantBookRealEnoughUnderstandingInterestingCommonSituationExplicit Author:James Arthur
“I can't read my poem "Distracted by an Ergonomic Bicycle" without thinking of Seattle, where the events of the poem took place, and I can't read "In Defense of the Semicolon" without thinking of Toronto - but why should that matter to anyone else? If another reader imagines "In Defense of the Semicolon" taking place in New Orleans, great.” ThinkingImagineDistractedBicycle Author:James Arthur
“I do own CDs by Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell, but I don't think of them as being major influences on my writing.” ThinkingWritingInfluence Author:James Arthur
“It is hard to compare cultures without overgeneralizing, but I think a lot of American poetry has an assertiveness - an upbeat quality - that's less typical of Canadian poetry. Of course there are poets in both countries to whom that generalization does not apply. Speaking broadly, I'd describe Canadians as being a bit more reserved than Americans. Not less opinionated - just less direct.” ThinkingCountryCultureQualityPoetDirectCompareAssertivenessUpbeat Author:James Arthur
“Whenever I visit my family in Canada, I remind myself that what many Americans would consider forthright, many Canadians would consider overbearing.” My Family Author:James Arthur
“I'm a mix; I'm sure some of my Canadian friends find me very American, both in person and on the page.” Find Me Author:James Arthur
“I do like Canadian poetry. Christian Bök, Anne Carson, Carmine Starnino, and Don McKay are a few of the Canadian poets whose work has been important to me. But I'm not sure that I do see poetry as a world apart. Some of my metaphors are based in the fantastic, but I try to be true to life as I understand it. That understanding is affected by my Canadianness, my Americanness, my whiteness, my gender, my age, my education, my experience...everything about me affects my view of reality. But I try to wrestle against those partialities, not embrace them.” WorldTryingImportantRealityAgeChristianUnderstandingPoetEmbraceMetaphorGenderBeing TrueFantasticNot SureTrue LifePartiality Author:James Arthur
“I think that being mindful of your own biases tends to lead you into ambiguity, not clarity, and that following those ambiguities is the only way to approach the universal.” ThinkingClarityAmbiguity Author:James Arthur
“I believe strongly in what John Keats called negative capability: the trait or practice that allows a poet to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. For Keats, William Shakespeare exemplified negative capability, and I do think it's extraordinary that for all the thousands of pages Shakespeare left behind, we really don't know much about Shakespeare's own personality or opinions.” ThinkingBelieveReasonI BelieveOpinionDoubtMysteryPoetPersonalityNegativeExtraordinaryUncertaintyCapabilityTraitsLeft Behind Author:James Arthur
“William Shakespeare tried hard to see every facet of every question, probably because he was more interested in questions than in answers. That's a big part of what makes him great, in my opinion.” Opinion Author:James Arthur
“I wrote the poems in Charms Against Lightning one by one, over almost a decade, and I did not write them toward any theme or narrative. But once I really got serious about putting together a book, I began to see that in fact there were themes across the poems, if only because my own obsessions had brought me back time and again to the same ground. I realized that any ordering of the poems would determine how those themes developed over the manuscript, and how the collection's dramatic conflicts were resolved.” WritingBookTogetherSeriousConflictDetermineI RealizedObsessionDramatic Author:James Arthur
“I don't think I did write any poems to fill narrative gaps. Not consciously, anyway. As much as possible, I try to discover my poems' subject matter through the act of writing, instead of deciding ahead of time what my poems will be about.” ThinkingWritingTrying Author:James Arthur
“I want each poem to be ambiguous enough that its meaning can shift, depending on the reader's own frame of reference, and depending on the reader's mood. That's why negative capability matters; if the poet stops short of fully controlling each poem's meaning, the reader can make the poem his or her own.” EnoughPoetNegativeMoodCapabilityAmbiguous Author:James Arthur
“I want to reiterate that my understanding of the poem is not the poem's core, true meaning. Once a poem goes out into the world, the poet is just one more reader.” WorldUnderstandingPoet Author:James Arthur
“Start listening to what you say. Are your comments and ideas negative? You aren't going become positive if you always say negative things. Do you hear yourself say"I could never do that","I never have any luck","I never get things right". Wow - that's negative self-talk! Try saying"I am going to do that","I am so lucky""I always try to get things right". Can you hear how much better that sounds?” IfsTryingIdeasSelfSoundInspiringListeningLuckyNegativeLuckCommentWowSo LuckySelf Talk Author:James Arthur
