An online publication to which I subscribe recently had an excerpt from a book (Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth) by Andrew Wyeth in which he discussed the poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost. Wyeth asked Frost if he went through a lot of revisions of this poem, and if it had been written in winter. Frost answered, "I'd been writing a very complicated, long-drawn-out poem, almost a story type of poem, entitled 'Death of a Hired Man.' I had finished at two o'clock in the morning. It was a hot August night, and I was exhausted. I walked out on the porch of my house and looked at the mountain range. It came to me in flash! I wrote it on an envelope I had in my pocket, and I only changed one word. It came out just like that."
I love to think about that sort of flash of clarity, where a great poem leaps from the universe into the mind of a poet, even without the stimulus of the same sort of scene to prompt it. But it may be that the intense work Frost put in on his long narrative poem was a required part of the birth of the Stopping by Woods poem. All that intensive effort may have primed the pump.
Readers, writers, what has been your own experience with writing that appears in your mind more or less fully accomplished? Is there any pattern to it that you can discern?
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6 comments:
I only have a flash of perfection rarely, and usually it's after I've been "off" on vacation or doing something completely unrelated to what I'm writing.
That's interesting, I only have these writing-in-overdrive experiences rarely too, but it happens when I've been working too hard. I have no time to write this, that's usually my first reaction, but then I must do it.
Mine is more surprising, not after a long effort, but simply one day I'll sit down at the computer and a fully formed piece of writing will seem to come from nowhere. It is rare, but not with a prompt like hard work or intense writing before it.
I just don't seem to get these. Maybe I have a plodding kind of mind. I write my shitty first draft, as Anne Lamott suggests, and then I rewrite and rewrite. At times the polished version thrills me, but I've never really had an experience like the one Frost described.
Charlie M
This kind of reminds me of the test to see if you had a stroke. Can you count backwards from 100 by sevens? I cannot do it when I'm compose mentis, let alone if I should ever have a real stroke to contend with. Likewise, I never had a fully formed poem or fish or anything else appear in my mind. Like Charlie, I can sometimes get close to what I want after a lot of work.
Melissa MKS
Ha! I love what Melissa said! I don't drink and drive... because I know that even sober I'd never be able to recite the alphabet backward. I can barely do it forward!
I have had a few poems 'appear' in my head almost spontaneously, but only during episodes of intense emotional duress. When Husband #2 walked out, I wrote some damn fine poetry. Burned most of it....
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