Interviewed by Frank Giampietro
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Hello and welcome to Southeast Review’s Poets on Process. I’m Frank Giampietro and today I’ll be talking with poet Andrew Hudgins, whose volumes of poetry include Ecstatic in the Poison, Babylon in a Jar, The Glass Hammer: A Southern Childhood, and Never-Ending, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, After the Lost War, a narrative, which received the poetry prize and Saints and Strangers, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize. He is also the author of a book of essays, The Glass Anvil, and is editor of a brand new book of James Agee’s poems called James Agee: Selected Poems, published as part of the Library of America’s American Poets Project Series. Hudgins awards and honors include the Witter Bynner, the Hanes poetry prize, and fellowships from the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Hudgins currently teaches at Ohio State University.
Q: Thanks so much for agreeing to do this.
A: Oh my pleasure, my pleasure.
Q: So this interview is part of a series of interviews I hope to do called Poets on Process. To begin with I’d like to address the title itself. How useful is a discussion on a poet’s process?
A: Oh, you know, I remember when I was a kid, actually a college student I guess, staying up to watch Anne Sexton on the Dick Cavet show and she looked like she was doped out of her gourd. She was pretty bored by the interview, and when Cavet asked her about her process, she started talking with animation and passion about certain kinds of paper and colored pens to work with and you could just see Cavet’s eyes cross, just trying to figure out where to go from there. I remember thinking that everybody has their own process; we fall in love with it, and nobody else cares. But, you know, what I try to tell my students is that you find your process by working as much as you possibly can and then you find out what works for you. I like to get up in the morning, have a cup of coffee with breakfast, and then suddenly find myself at the computer writing. But that’s not the way it goes anymore, now that I’m married and have dogs. I get up, I have breakfast, and then we walk the dogs. The dogs kind of determine my life that way. When I was a younger guy and I worked during the day, I wrote at night, which is not my preferred way of doing things. But that was the only time I had so that’s the way I did it.
Q: Have you ever been in a situation in which you heard someone talking about his or her process and you think: “Wow that’s a great idea! I gotta try that!”?
A: I guess I’m suspicious of other people’s processes. I understand why they work for them but not so much why they might work for me. I tend to work a lot in my old notebooks and a lot of facts that I’ve dug up or research that’s floating around. And I’ll try different things but I don’t ever remember hearing somebody say that they did a certain thing that I thought: “Oh, that’s exactly what I want to do.” I’ll tell you one that stuns me is Louis Auchincloss said in an interview that he would outline his novels on the weekend and then, while he was doing work at his law firm, he would write the novel in the fifteen-minute gaps between meeting with clients.
Q: Wow.
A: I just remember sitting and thinking: “That is something I could not do.” And then I thought, “Well I bet if that’s the only time you have to write, I bet you [could] make it work.” I do wonder how writing like that would change one’s writing.
Q: Yeah. I think my attraction to hearing about a poet’s process comes from the same place as when I watch a biography on TV or read a biography. I’m constantly going: “How am I like that?” If I have any similarities I feel … justified: “Well I must be a poet if I do that too!”
A: (laughing) Well, you know, you reminded me of something. When I said I didn’t really pay much attention to other people’s processes I actually did. I remember when I was at Breadloaf—I guess I was about thirty—I started hanging out with fiction writers for the first time and I remember [that] I really liked the way they worked. Which is, they went to the computer and they just sat there, well actually there weren’t computers then—typewriters—and they would just put in hours worth of work a day and that was the way I wanted to do it if I could find the time to do it. And it’s still the way I like to do it. I like to sit there for a long time—I’m not always working on the same thing. But I like to put my time in.
Q: Well you know that brings up a quote I’d like to mention to see what you think of it. John Ashbury recently said in this poets.org documentary he did: “Perhaps if I spend an hour or, at the most two hours, when I’m feeling really inspired I’m done for the day and then there’s the problem of what to do with the other twenty-two or twenty-three hours of the day. I feel I should do something important, but what?” I guess my question is: do you feel this way and what do you do with the other twenty-three hours?
A: It’s a funny thing because there are days when nothing’s going to happen, then sometimes I sit there and hope something’s going to happen. Sometimes I get up and walk away and read or something else. But I tend to have a lot of different projects going at any one time so that, yes, if I can put in two good, hard hours of working, then that’s a good day. Then the rest of the day you can start doing reading for other projects. That’s what I do. Like everyone else these days I spend time trying to keep up with e-mail. Cursed e-mail! But you know, I guess when I was younger I felt exactly the same way as Ashbury does. But now my nerves seem a little calmer. I think I can spend more time working.
Q: Interesting. Well along those lines, do you find that you go back to poems that you started years or a month ago? How do you deal with those issues?
A: My hard-drive is full of stuff that’s been floating around in there for a decade. Some of them are ones I thought were finished. Some that I knew weren’t finished. Some that I knew were only starts. So I’ll dig them up from time to time and see if I can push them further along. So there’s always kind of a turning motion that’s going on. I guess it’s the old equivalent to thinking you’ve finished a poem and putting it on the floor and pulling it out a month later to see if you’ve actually quite finished that poem. But in another way it feels like you’re simply an ironsmith going from sword to sword all of them a different part of the sword-forming process.
Q: That’s great. Yeah, yeah, I often hear poets say: “Oh well you know this line came to me and I said ‘oh that’s going to be a perfect line for that poem I wrote three years ago. It finally came together with that line.” And I always think: you know, I don’t believe that. How could you possibly remember a poem from three years ago?
A: (laughing) That tends to not really happen to me.
Q: That’s comforting.
A: Every now and then if I’ve pulled up something recently and been looking at it, trying to get it back in my head, something—you know, a new way of moving through it—will occur to me. But almost everything comes to me while I’m actually sitting there, looking at the thing. I do sometimes do that old trick of staring at it, getting it back in my head before I go to bed to see if my brain can process it at night.
Q: Yes.
A: And sometimes when I’m having trouble sleeping, you know, if you’re deeply immersed in a project […] as you’re going to sleep, ideas will really start to come during that period of time. But no, to suddenly remember something from three years ago that I haven’t looked at for three years. No.
Q: Never. Well along those same lines, I’ve had this experience of writing something and then not being able to remember it at all a day later. And my wife actually just told me that she heard a story about Stephen King, that he used to write while he was having a black out, he was a real heavy drinker, and would black out. [He] would come back to it the next day and be like, “Wow, this is really good.” But my question is: do you feel like there is a necessary disconnect between memory while you’re writing? Is it a different world your mind goes to that can’t remember what you’ve written? Do you experience that at all?
A: I forget what I’ve done. It worried me at first because I thought I had some kind of memory block, but when I’m doing it, I’m completely immersed in it, syllable by syllable, if I can really get my brain to where I’m seeing nothing else. But then, there’s something that happens when that period is over and I go about the rest of the day; no it doesn’t come back to me.
Q: I want to give you some quotations from you, from an interview I heard you do I guess four, maybe five years ago. See what you think of them compared to what you say now. You said: “I don’t like to show them (your poems) until they’re pretty far along. I will show them to Erin (your wife) when they’re at a certain stage, when I think they’re done or nearly done. Or sometimes I’ll even consult with her a little earlier—should I use this word, or this word here—that kind of thing.” And I thought it was interesting because it made me think of this: how often do you break out the Thesaurus or change a single word? Do you subscribe on any level to the notion of first thought, best thought in regards to those kinds of decisions?
A: No, I am absolutely not a first thought, best thought kind of person. I consider first drafts a necessary evil to get to the good stuff and one of the hardest things that I had to learn as a writer was not to get depressed by early first versions of things. The early versions are merely the scaffolding for what is going to come later. And I do use the Thesaurus and the dictionary and the rhyming dictionary and the Internet to look up facts and the encyclopedia I have on the computer. I’m happy to use any tool I can to push that poem past the usually cliché, not very interesting stab at the subject.
Q: Right, right. Interesting. All right, one more quotation. You said in an interview that “with the poems I want to make my own decisions and get them as far along as I can, then I’ll sometimes send them out to journals or I’ll keep them aside to show to friends, more likely I’ll send them to journals and then sometimes they’ll be published and then I’ll look at them and go: ‘oh no, back into that one.’” So the implication was that once something was published you’ll look at it in print and go, “oh boy, why did I think that was ready to be published?” And I thought that interesting because for a new poet, for me, when something gets published my reaction is, “cool, I don’t have to mess with that one anymore.”
A: You know, I was sitting there as you read that statement I made and thinking back on when I was a young man: publishing seemed to be the goal to the whole process. And I knew at an artistic level that it wasn’t. But at a practical, everyday level, it seemed to be. Also publishing seemed to be so far out of reach and it was very hard for me. I mean I used to think that it was almost part of the process. The version of putting it in the drawer was to put it in an envelope and send it to New York. When it came back we’d get back to work. But at a certain point it became hard, once they’d been published, to break them back down again and get back into them. And now, that’s just simply not true. The poems seem very, very, very fluid to me. I guess the same thing though is when they appear in books they seem a little set; it’s harder to go back and rethink them, but I have. Once it’s appeared in a book, you know, you think: “What the heck am I going to do with it if I revise it?” But I go back and do it anyways.
Q: I had a teacher once, and it’s funny because I went back and told her she said this a few years later and she said, “I didn’t say that,” “I can’t believe I said that!” Anyways, she said: “To be a great poet you must have great sorrow or great wealth.” [Laughter]
A: Well, you know, I can’t think of many that have great wealth [ … ] I don’t know if that’s necessarily true. I think a lot of people write for a lot of different reasons. I don’t sense great sorrow in Alexander Pope. I certainly don’t sense it in Byron and do we sense it in Shelley? I don’t know. Do we sense it in Blake? I don’t know.
Q: Blake is frustrated certainly, but not hopeless …
A: Yeah. We can, all of us, confuse our own processes with essential process. In other words, what’s essential for us, may not be essential for all writers, every place at every time.
Q: Right. Just to bounce to another question here. Do you have people that still read your work [in the early stages]? And has that changed over the years? Do you have fewer people read your work these days or are you more apt to trust your editing skills than you were, say, ten years ago?
A: Yeah, yeah. I guess I do. As I say I let my wife look at the poems. I’m very open to criticism. If somebody says, “that’s a problem,” or “you need to think about this,” sometimes I wont take their advice. But almost always I do. Actually—come to think of it—I’ve got this book coming out in March called Shut Up, You’re Fine and its comedy. So I didn’t at all mind shipping that around to people and saying: “What do you see that can make these poems funnier?” And when it would come back and I was listening to it, or looking at people’s comments, trying to think my way through it, often I didn’t understand their explanation as to what the problem was, but if two or three people put their fingers on the same spot it didn’t matter what the explanation was, they were all seeing something. And then I had to go in and figure out, in my own terms, what that something was.
Q: That’s interesting.
A: And that was hard to do. I find it very easy with something like comedy, made for an audience, to listen to people’s opinions. But frankly, I find it very easy to listen to people’s opinions about the serious poems too. I tend to grumble more about it but I find it useful. I guess I just don’t go out and court it as much as I used to.
Q: Right. I had a recent experience with a poem where I showed it to one person I have tremendous respect for and this person said, “oh well, you gotta take this line out.” And then I showed it to another person who I have tremendous respect for and this person said: “Whatever you do, leave this line in.” (laughter) And that happens, right? And at some level my feeling becomes: OK, if it’s a good enough poem, it’s reached this level of “goodness” that makes it so that this line won’t make any difference whether I take it out or leave it in. That’s my only comfort at that point. But how do you deal with that kind of situation?
A: I don’t remember anything like that happening very often, or recently. But I remember working myself into a frenzy when I was in graduate school over exactly that issue. And what came to me then was the obvious answer, which was that the poet has to determine the right choice for his or her own purposes, which he understands, and the outsiders do not. But also the fact that you got these people outside who give you these opinions means that they are forcing you to look through their eyes, [to think] about your own work more broadly, and [to] challenge your own assumptions in an uncomfortable, and maybe irresolvable way, makes you a better artist. And it also makes us focus happily on the subjective quality of readers who read through their own aesthetics, and their own very different reading backgrounds, and their own nervous systems. And you realize fairly quickly that readers are as limited as writers and, you know, for a long time the greatness of Wallace Stevens was hidden from me. And I kept going back and banging my head about it and finally the door opened. But the problem wasn’t Stevens; the problem was with me. My limitations.
Q: Right. You know, you keep going back to this idea that poetry is fluid. It’s about process; it’s not about product. And then it occurs to me that the title of this series is Poets on Process and there is a little different meaning of process there. But they are similar in a way. We do have to settle at some point with the idea that poetry is process and there are never any perfected poems.
A: I know that what you’re saying is true. Because you have to purify your own devotion to the art, which means that you have to stop thinking about it as a product. You have to think of it as something that has to be perfect, which means focusing on process until it’s done. But we all meet people to whom process becomes all-consuming and there’s never a product. And that’s not a place many of us want to be…
Q: And a lot of times those are very talented writers too. Would you agree?
A: Yeah, very talented people who for some reason can’t finish it; they can’t extricate themselves from the process, because the process has become the whole point. I don’t know, I don’t know.
Q: I want to talk about your new book a little bit and talk about process in terms of it. The new title is James Agee: Selected Poems and you’re the editor for it. I was just thinking as I was reading it, and reading the introduction, what your process was. What is your process when you’re picking poems for a selected volume? Is it in any way a similar process to writing poetry?
A: No, not in this case, I don’t think. Agee was easy to do because almost everything he wrote is in the book. The major selecting was done on the long poem, “John Carter,” which was a poem that Agee himself gave up on and so what has to be done was going in and picking out the best pieces of that particular poem. And frankly, The Library of America did that. We conferred very early on it and came to the conclusion that Agee published one book in his life. One book of poems. And they were scattered poems that were pulled together in Robert Fitzgerald’s edition. And that’s mostly what we used as the basis for this edition. You know, its not like you can find a big body of work of Edna Millay’s and then having to choose the best poem and thinking about best versus representational. Or getting a chronological sense of her work over time and all those things you have to balance. These just weren’t issues with this book, thank God. It made the whole thing very easy to do.
Q: The nightmare of trying to edit an Emily Dickenson: Selected. Can you imagine that?
A: Exactly. Exactly. And you see even in something like the big Norton Edition of American Literature where their solution for Emily Dickenson is to give you something like eighty pages of poems (laughter). And with Dickenson that’s the smart way to do it because there is such an enormous body of extremely fine, complex work.
Q: Right, right. I always say this when I’m reading Walt Whitman, that I’m not reading the best version. Like whatever poem I’m reading, I think: “This is good but there’s probably a version out there that’s better and I’m not reading it!” [Laughter]
A: Well most editors, they just go with the first edition, but there’s a lot to be said about that deathbed edition. But you’re absolutely right—you never quite know what you’re doing. I mean I like that first edition and I think it’s a fascinating thing but you know, for just quick shorthand you go with the deathbed edition. It’s the last one the author signed off on.
Q: Exactly. Did you find that reading Agee, getting so involved in his work, influenced your own poetry? Did you find it changing? Looking more like an Agee[’s poetry] at all?
A: No, not yet. I did most of that work from August to December last year and I was completely immersed in his poetry. [I] re-read the prose, even the film criticism, which I’d read. I guess I’d read it twice—once when I was an undergraduate and then once there was a later edition somewhere [ … ] Although I had not read the novel until much more recently. I wish I’d read it sooner. And then a couple biographies—there’s a ton of secondary work on Agee. And it was a lot of fun to just immerse myself in the body of one person’s life, which I haven’t done in a long time. But as far as influencing my own work, not really, because I’d mostly been working on prose and the poems that I’d been writing were in a couple of modes that I’m committed to following out right now. But I have to say, the idea of a long sonnet did come back into my head in a way that it never has before. So maybe down the road. I don’t know about you, but I find that there’s a really long lag time between reading something and letting it into my head before the influence starts. I used to say it was seven years but I don’t know that that’s a reliable time lag for everyone.
Q: Yeah, that’s interesting. I do find that if I’m reading a very good novel I start to think like the main character, but its immediate and I go, “wow I’m going to become this character.”
A: Yeah, I do sometimes find that when I’m deeply immersed in certain kinds of writing projects. I don’t want to take on a serious, powerful novel or a serious body of poetry until I’m finished because yeah, you’re right, that voice can pull me away. I don’t find that true when I’m reading history or nonfiction.
Q: Well I think this is it. Is there anything you’d like to add or something we haven’t covered about process that you think would be worthwhile?
A: Well, yeah, you know one thing that does interest me is I do all my writing on the computer now and that to me was unimaginable twelve years ago, ten years ago when I first started working on the computer. I used to do everything with pencils or pen on legal pads. At first I started using the word processors for prose and not poetry. And then I started working—you know, I’d write the poems out in longhand and then put them on the computer, and [work] with them there. And now, I’ve gone completely to the computer and what’s interesting is students who are much more technically sophisticated than I would ever even want to be are still surprised that I do everything, every step of the way on the computer. I don’t know what to make of that. But I’m interested in it.
Q: That’s interesting. I have a friend who is a novelist who just started to collect antique typewriters and has started to write a novel on one. He says that the beautiful part about it is you write it, you take it out, you put it down, and its done. You can’t go back to it—you know what I mean? So he’s writing the whole novel like that.
A: That is fascinatingly weird, because I was never so happy to get rid of something in the world as my Underwood Manual. I hated that thing. I was such a bad typist that when I was done, there was so much liquid paper on it, it looked like I’d typed it on stucco.
Q: Well now, whenever you want another just go on Ebay and there are tons of them.
A: I will never want another one. I remember once, years ago, watching—you know when David Letterman would list things we’ve dumped out of a five-story tower, and things we’ve rolled over with a steamroller. And one of the kickers: they threw what looked to be an old Underwood Manual off of this tower and it shattered on the ground. I laughed myself hysterical watching that because that’s what I wanted to do with that piece of shit.
Q: That’s great! Well, I’ve found that I love the little notebooks. I’m always looking for a new little notebook. Do you use notebooks at this point at all?
A: I don’t have the little notebooks. I’d take those big spiral ring binders and they’d be part diary, part notes, part things I’d cut out but wanted to keep. And the computer, I just find it really hard to do a notebook, like that, on the computer and I just have not been able to do it.
Q: Yeah, it’s a strange interface. It really is.
A: I wish there was a way [ … ] you could keep kind of a notebook if you’re moving through it, piling up ideas, you could actually just have a weird folder full of odds and ends but it doesn’t have the chronological feel of the notebook and the ability then to move from one notebook with other material as you’re moving forward. I don’t know; it’s a disappointment. But I haven’t been keeping those notebooks at all. It’s a sorrow because they were something I really liked doing.
Q: I recently rented a car and in the car there was a geologist’s notebook that some geologist had left behind. I called him and told him I had it and gave it to him. But it had a plastic hard cover and then the paper had some kind of coating on it that made it to where if you got the whole thing wet the words would still be there.
A: Wow.
Q: So I bought myself one.
A: I’ll bet you did.
Q: Yeah, and now, I’m using that. And then I’ll dump that in six months and get something else. [Laughter]
A: That’s funny. For a while I played with those Stenographer’s notebooks …
Q: Yeah, those are great.
A: That’s when I was in college. It wasn’t all that terribly useful. So finally I went to big 150 page spiral ring notebooks because it put off further and further that having to move viable comments into the next notebook, which could be a week-long process.
Q: Right, that’s the hard part. I tried speech recognition software.
A: Did you see the Rick Power’s piece about how he did that?
Q: Yes, the whole novel he wrote that way.
A: Yes, he’d sit on his bed with his laptop and he had a projector [ … ] it would project the laptop screen on to an entire wall. And then he would use speech recognition software. I sat and thought for a long time about speech recognition software. How did that work for you?
Q: It was a total bust. And it wasn’t because it didn’t work. It was that first thought, best thought thing. Because all of my first thoughts—talk about crap on paper—man, when I speak them they are really, really lousy. So I think there are people that have this thing where every time they talk it’s like a lecture, and its really interesting. I think for those kinds of people it could work.
A: But you know I guess I’ve spent so much time trying to make the written words sound natural—which is, of course, an act of artifice—that listening to actual speech then moving that back toward a written artifice, that would be a very different thought process, wouldn’t it?
Q: It is. It’s weird. It’s a little surreal. It’s almost like found poetry and making that into a poem.
A: And then there’s always that problem that if you teach yourself to speak in sentences you’ll start to sound like one of those pricks who you hated in high school, you know? [Laughter]
Q: Yes.
A: Like one of those people you didn’t want to become but you see yourself becoming one of them because you live so much of your life in books that you’re afraid you sound like a book.
Q: Yes, exactly. One other quick process question and then we’ll bring this to an end. I heard Louise Glück say in an interview that she noticed in her first book that all of her poems were fragmented, fragmentary thoughts instead of complete sentences. She said, you know what, I’m only going to write in complete sentences. So she wrote complete sentences. And then somebody said, you know what, you don’t have any questions in your poems. So in her next book she made sure to put a whole bunch of questions in her poems. And I just thought that was [ … ] great for any number of reasons. But I was wondering if you, when you go from book to book or project to project. if you’re confident enough to kind of go on your whim like that. How do you choose projects, or how do projects choose you in terms of process?
A: I think I’m one of those people that believes that work will lead me to a project and that sometimes projects have to be abandoned because they become [ … ] over-written, over-indulged in, and not on the sentence level. I found myself writing in my last book in meter and rhyme a lot but that was because I was taking a lot of poems that had begun life as probably blank verse or [ … ] free verse or [ … ] unrhymed iambic pentameter and I wasn’t getting them where I wanted to go [ … ] so I just simply added another layer of complexity onto the formal structure and it forced me into the subject matter. Right now I’ve got two projects in my head—one is a series of very, very short narratives, usually under thirty lines, free verse, usually longer than a blank verse line and that’s a form I just kind of developed as I was going and another project, completely different, which is a form of mono-rhyme in which every line of the poem has the same vowel and consonance in it. And then, to make it more interesting, there has to be about two, three, maybe four beats in each line and—as you can see—those are as different of projects as they can be but those kind of evolved from experimenting and working as I was going. I’m very dubious of elaborately conceived schemes. That doesn’t mean they don’t work for some people. They work wonderfully for any number of people. But for me, those structures become constrictive.
Q: Well, along those lines, a friend says that she has written a certain way, started writing her poems as she does everyday. She’ll start writing a certain way for six months and after six months she realizes: “What the hell was I thinking? This sucks.” And the waste of time of six months [ … ] just scares me terribly but I fear that’s what’s happening.
A: Get used to it.
Q: So it’s OK isn’t it?
A: It’s the nature of the beast. If you’re going to experiment, you’re going to push yourself into places you’re uncomfortable with. You’re going to be chasing a lot of rabbits that get away. And one of the interesting things about being a poet is you can often break those things back down into ways that are useful, that you can follow in another direction. It’s very hard to be six months into a novel and then just decide that the whole thing is misbegotten. But I’m like you, you know, when I was in college I would put fifty, sixty, seventy hours into a poem and then [ … ] realize this piece is conceptually flawed, that there’s nothing you can do except shoot it in the head, and put its body in a ditch. And you get that real sick feeling because you know all that time was wasted. But ultimately when learning the sentence-by-sentence skills and the line-by-line and the sound-by-sound skills, you learn to look at your ideas with a weathered eye.
Q: Well this has been great! Thank you very much.
A: It’s been a pleasure. All right, goodbye.
