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[Replies to Questions about Poetic Composition]
| (a) | Normally I take notes on pieces of paper, later destroy these drafts and copy the final version into a Manuscript Book. But from time to time, when I am dissatisfied with a final version, I may make further drafts, usually on paper, but occasionally in the Manuscript Book. Often I do make some minor changes to the poem in the Manuscript Book – a word or two here and there. It takes me roughly a year to fill a Manuscript Book. I include everything I bring to any kind of final shape, even if I am aware that the poem is entirely a failure. |
| (b) | There are two kinds of poem I write – those that have a kernel of actual experiential knowledge; and those that grow from mental dryness and the page 251 wish to write a poem. The first are sometimes successful; the second, never – but I continue to write them out of stupidity. |
| (c) | Most of the poems I start are brought to some kind of final shape; but the number I would consider full and truly formed poems would be at most one in ten. A poem may be formally shaped, but unsatisfactory because of its lack of more than a fragment of experiential knowledge; and some poems less well shaped are more satisfactory for the reverse reason. |
| (d) |
I do sometimes work up drafts of older poems – unsuccessful ones – and try to rescue what is alive in them. For example, in Pig Island Letters, ‘Postman’, ‘Thoughts of a Remuera House-wife’, and ‘To a Print of Queen Victoria’. I do sometimes incorporate sections of drafts into later poems. This is often a matter of an image or two – as when I shifted the phrase about the wind ‘carrying spray to salt the landward farms’ from a discarded position in one of the drafts for ‘The Beach House’, to near the end of the first of the ‘Pig Island Letters’ sequence. |
| (e) | With luck I might complete about sixty poems in a year, but these would include about fifty that would not be up to publication standard. I tend to be continually trying my hand at it. Some years, though, are better than others; and I sometimes get a lucky run of four or five good poems in a row. Tut-tut! One mustn’t number the tribes of Israel! |
| (f) | I think more than half of my poems go through on one draft or two with minor changes – as I grow older, though, and inspiration fails me, or the mind get tired, or honesty forces me to admit how much of my work is ill-made, I have tended to make more drafts and changes, sometimes with very good results. Some of my earlier published poems should have gone through another draft. |
| (g) | I almost always write out my drafts by hand because it is a natural and biological procedure that way, helping to body-mind unity; my subconscious mind might recoil from the machine and leave me to my own stupidity. But the final – as it were, ‘published’ – version, I like to see type-written to get an idea of how it will look in print. |
| (h) | Really, drafts written out are just helps to memory. The essential composition goes on in the mind itself, just as much as when Burns composed entire poems walking behind the plough, and wrote out final drafts when he got home from work. Drafts are just labour-saving devices in the mental kitchen. |
| (i) | It seems to me often that each poem is part of a large sub-conscious corpus of personal myth, like an island above the sea, but joined underwater to other islands. Each poem is thus part of the big single poem I am always writing to let God know I still exist . . . . |
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