How (and why) I write

In the old days it would have been easy to tell you how I write. There was only one way. It was with a pencil on a piece of paper. I began the process in an old exercise book and when I had made a big enough mess I typed what I had written into a computer and printed it out so that I could see it clearly once more. Then I cluttered the fresh and unmarked copy with arrows and crossings out and words written sideways. When that was unreadable I typed any changes into the original and printed it out to deface again. The cycle went round and around. I stapled each new version on top of the one before it so that the writing evolved vertically through a growing pile of papers. The poems built up in layers until I couldn't find anything else to write on them. When they seemed to float away I would be done. I've kept most of the piles. Some are only a few pages thick. Some are still waiting to float away. Many I couldn't get a staple through anymore so they exist in two or three volumes. If you thumbed their corners quickly enough they would play a cartoon of the poem assembling itself. That would be an accurate image for the experience. 

I still write this way of course. But I have come to see that another process has been going on beside this all the time. After twenty-five years of practicing, writing now seems to be as much about me not having a pencil in my hand as it does about having one at the ready. At its heart it seems to depend on a special type of listening. That listening is to a great conversation that is taking place all around me. I do this when I am awake and asleep, when I am mowing the lawns or driving or cooking or seeing patients. It has become involuntary. It is as though all that scribbling and putting things down only serves to turn some giant cog inside of me. That cog turns another, and another, until every cell door in me opens and the world passes through eye and ear and arm and leg. Then I am flooded. I am moved. I am delighted. And I am wrecked. The world flickers. I turn and I turn and wonder how to start putting it all down. Writing becomes at once an experience of the world and a report on those experiences.