Tantalizing, tidbit from a Village Voice interview with poet Michael Robbins. I want to see the poem!
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/...view_alien.php
So when you sit down to write a poem, what is that process like? Many of them are very short. How long does it usually take you?
I've tried to write long poems. I wrote about a three-page poem last year and read it maybe a few months after I'd finished it and realized that it was about two stanzas long, and the rest of it was me just trying to pad out those two stanzas.
And the two stanzas that were left were about Fleetwood Mac. I had been writing a poem about Fleetwood Mac without knowing it.
I'm a very slow poet. I might think of a couple of good lines and put them in a poem that I'm working on that takes me--I've been working on this poem right now which is loosely based on the video for Guns N Roses's "November Rain." And I've been working on it over a month, just writing things and deleting them and trying to think of a good way to rhyme with 'Axl.' It turns out 'Paxil' was staring me in the face the whole time and I didn't realize it.