Once again I am writing about the subject which seems so simple to me and yet which confuses so many readers of contemporary poetry. When I say "form is an extension of content," I truly mean to be so simple as to be almost tautological. I mean the poet first has something to say and then he finds a mode for saying it. That's so simple a proposition as to be of almost no meaning or help at all. But it can be enormously helpful in looking retrospectively at a poet's work. It means you have to look at a body of it. You have to discover the territory that author was trying to carve out for himself, and at that point many of his stylistic choices will also begin to make sense. For example, Olson's concerns were with archeology, history, and language as it changes through history, so when he uses his city of Gloucester, Massachusetts, as a focus for these interests, open-ended lines which seem digressive become essential; and discovering that each subject led rapidly to another and left a field of discourse, a field of information to roam around in, his lines found themselves unhappy with simple subjects and predicates. Olson found that history doesn't have beginnings, middles, and ends, as the neat composer's mind would like to think. So each poem becomes a field, a landscape of ideas, and completely baffles the critic or reader whose reading techniques were formed by the New Criticism.

On the other hand, there is no reason why the premise "form is an extension of content" cannot be used for more orderly or traditional poetry as well. I propose it as a means of looking at all poetry in some consistent way, and not having to leave out the work of difficult poets like Ashbery, Olson, Duncan, or in fact any contemporary poet, because at times all of us are writing our own rules for the poem as we form the poem. And the reader can look for those forms and find them, I think. His only limitation is that he must look at a body of poems rather than just one to find this working in most cases.

I want to talk about the process for the poet of carving out a territory, creating the subject matter or content which helps the reader identify his voice or style as a poet. And the simplest thing for me to do is to try to discuss my own interests in this matter.

From 1963 to 1966, I taught junior high school in the slums of Manhattan. Like all of my other money-earning activities, it was a job I did as best I could but which I basically hated. However, I did have many interesting experiences on this job, which is more than I can say for the dozens of other jobs I've had since high school, as I've always had to earn my living, and I've done everything from working in the cafeteria to washing test tubes in a laboratory. The one thing all my jobs have had in common is that they have been menial and they have paid poorly.

After I was no longer teaching junior high school and was trying to make my living doing things I enjoyed, like giving poetry readings and poetry workshops, David Ignatow, a poet who has many fine poems about how awful menial jobs are, asked me if I had ever written any poems about my teaching experiences. I told him that I hadn't and that I was sure I never would. He was shocked because he professes to believe that our working experiences are our most meaningful. I felt like that was false in my case and told him so. I told him that I daydream my way through jobs I hate and that my imagination just wasn't caught by the customers in the bookstore or the impossible kids in a slum school English classroom. I also pointed out that his best poems were complaints about how demeaning and terrible bad jobs were to the spirit, and how the spirit could survive in spite of, not because of, impossible jobs. That he wrote about survival, not the so-called meaningful experiences of the work itself. I also told him that in my opinion my work was poetry, for that was what was most meaningful to me; and that everyone makes rules about the fact that we shouldn't write poems about writing poetry.

Naturally, we came to an impasse in this discussion. What he was doing was trying to define his own territory in poetry, one that I love and admire when it is written by David Ignatow. And what I was doing was trying to define my own territory and telling another poet that we owned different pieces of land and shouldn't insist on community property. One of my best poems is "The Fable of the Fragile Butterfly" which is precisely about the fact that my real life is a fantasy, dream life, even though I accept the proletarian concept that we all have to work for our daily bread (actually, when David Ignatow was talking to me ten years ago, for some reason he must have thought that I came from a middleclass family and like many young poets, in his eyes, wrote out of some decadent, bourgeois need).

After this conversation, it became important to me to try to understand what subjects I found suitable for poetry, from my life, and which ones I had rejected out of hand. Actually, I began this examination for another reason than what I am speaking of now—which is to define the content, the territory of my poems, which then extends itself into the voice or style of my writing. I actually felt that if I could understand why I chose some things as material for poems and rejected others, I might be able to rescue some of what I rejected as poem material after all. You see, poets really are stuck with themselves. For the poem is always the personal narrative and most of us have very limited selves. Most of us could write our autobiographies in one small volume. In my second book of poems, I wrote the line in the title poem, "the answer is to leave autobiography." For a poet you may think of as autobiographical or "confessional" (a term I wish we could get rid of), this is a strange line. And yet I believe it and still mean it. What I mean is that everything in one's life can be emblematic of something else. We are stuck with the facts of our life as a main body of information. But we are not stuck with talking about them literally or autobiographically. And what I had discovered was that some things, even a trivial incident like serving food in a cafeteria, became emblematic of something I could talk about with more of the accoutrements of my fantasy life, which was what was important to me. Whereas, the events of a day in a New York City junior high school were so complete with their own intrinsic meaning that they did not seem emblematic to me at all. In fact, most of the time I just wanted to forget them. If I could have written a book about my teaching experiences in the New York public school system, the book would have been Up the Down Staircase. But Belle Kaufman wrote it for all of us who taught then. And there was no poetry in it at all. None.

I also came to some definite conclusions while I was thinking about why I didn't write any poems about being a junior high school teacher, and that is that it takes a long time to digest material for poetry. It is seldom that you can write well about experiences that you are having for the first time. Any of you who write poetry will notice that sometimes you can use immediate experience—your love for someone, your feeling of hurt or rejection when someone leaves you, for instance—and what you may find is that it is an experience you have had before, perhaps in another form. And now the experience is available with some perspective. You may even be able to use the details of the current experience because they have become emblematic of details in previous experiences. Therefore it is not autobiography you are writing, but your life you are using in order to write about life as other people experience it too.

Two of the poets who were very important to me (though I didn't realize it at the time) when I was trying to understand these things about my own work were Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell—at least the Ginsberg of Kaddish and the Lowell of Life Studies and now of The Dolphin—because I began to realize that there was something happening in those works which transcended the act of writing about oneself. First of all, it involves using either the most dramatic and important details of one's life or the opposite, using something trivial, like a description of the furniture in your father's room. What this did was make the reader accept the emblematic reality of details and events. And what that leads to is a concept of personal mythology. Your father is not your father but an archetypal one. His room is not just a room but a place where important events occur.

The poet, then, is a person willing to see his life as more than itself and his autobiographical technique, ironically, should leave autobiography behind.

About this same time in my history when David Ignatow asked me why I didn't write poems about teaching junior high school, I made a statement in print which I still believe, but which is one of those ambiguities that haunt their authors all their lives. I said, "The poem is as interesting as the person who writes it." Of course I meant that the poet either invents his autobiography by selecting what is most important or interesting about his life to write about, or he in fact is smart enough to know that his life is dull but his mind isn't and he then gives his reader a fantasy self which is interesting. At any rate, you will never read a good poem that doesn't also make you think the poet was a fascinating person. And in fact a reader will reject an otherwise well formed poem if the speaker does not win him over in this way.

When I arrived at Hollins College a few months ago, I sat in on many pleasant conversations. By the third day I decided that if I stayed any length of time I would have to write about pets, for I don't think I heard a conversation which didn't turn to pets at some point. Now, this doesn't have anything to do with the way my mind selects material for poetry. I look for things which appear and reappear. I try to find subjects that somehow touch on everyone's lives and when I particularize them, I try to make my details become emblematic, not simply remain idiosyncracies of my life. I have to admit that I didn't write anything about pets while I was there, though I did finish a poem about a carnivorous plant and I'm now working on a poem called "Annie's Arctic Snake" which uses an image of a silver snake on the Antarctic ice. And I am also tempted to write about the albino junco which comes regularly to feed on the campus—for rarities are my interest, not the mundane. People are always surprised when I claim Stevens as an important influence on my poetry—they often suggest Williams—but actually what I have found to love in Stevens is the exotic. You will notice that when I choose a subject for a poem, even sour milk, I always have something about magic, about transformations, about rare objects, rare beauty, or if nothing else simply use images like a naked girl riding on a zebra, or clocks in my elbows.

Ignatow writes poems about accepting the dull and boring world we sometimes have to live in—by surviving and enduring it. He is a stoic and his poetry contains the power of stoicism. But my poetry is about beauty and how it rescues us, if only through our fantasy lives, from what is mundane and dull. So my poems always have gold and silver and diamonds from fairy tales in them, even if they are in the form of an orange or a flower or an animal. I could not write about teaching junior high school or most other jobs I've had because they were a landscape where my fantasy was denied rather than turned on. I had already invented a mythical Diane for the poems. She was a Cinderella figure. Beautiful but covered with ashes, so to speak. Waiting for the prince to come along and pick her out for her small foot (a sign of natural superiority) as opposed to the big clumsy feet of the rich, successful, and vulgar but happy other people. She was strong even though sensitive. She was shy but eloquent. She could hardly be a junior high school teacher, for we all know what they look like. They can't be too sensitive or the kids would run them out of the classroom. They mainly wear heavy shoes, sensible clothes (because they get covered with chalk during the day), have loud voices in order to coach the volleyball teams during recess, live in tract houses or middle-class condominiums, and teach remedial reading in their spare time.

No Ferraris, no lonely beaches, no motorcycle racers or Hollywood nightclubs or hikes in the woods. No, for me to write about teaching junior high school would have been more unthinkable than actually punching that time clock every morning at 7:30 and rexographing those thousands of improve-your-vocabulary exercises I really did. Just as I could not write a poem about the cats and dogs of Hollins College, for it would have to be a poem with a cat suffering from ataxia, a dog which steals chickens but which the owner still expects to sell for $10, the hourlong Thurberian monologue by Thomas Berger about his dachshund Schotsie, the Burmese cat which sat on my lap when I was feeling unwell … well, surely you can see that to write a poem about pets at Hollins College would be the same as writing a poem about teaching junior high school. My animals must be exotic—an imaginary silver snake, an albino junco—or have dramatic events surrounding them—being shot in the head by a devoted owner.

I have been having dreams about the poetry world. One night I dreamed that I left my book bag at a poetry reading and when I went back to get it, it was filled with animals. The man who gave it to me said, "Oh yes, all the people at the poetry reading had animals they needed to get rid of and instead of giving them to the SPCA where they might be killed they put them in your book bag for you to take away."

"But I can't take them," I said. "I travel and can't have any pets." Then I looked into my large bag and started pulling animals out. First a large black cat which had a dragon's head. Then a small white cat which was covered with blood from a wound on its back. Then there was a tiny soggy white shape, as big as a cake of soap. It was the embryo, perfectly formed, of a swan. Finally out of the bag came two little pea-sized pellets. They were the perfectly shaped fetuses of a collie and a horse. I threw all the animals away, saying "I can't take them with me."

I often make poems out of dreams but somehow that one did not seem like material for a poem to me. Yet I have remembered it, and that is an essential item in the process of writing poetry, for me. I have never kept a pad by my bedside to jot down ideas when I think of them at night. I have never been able to keep notebooks or journals like Anais Nin or Annie Dillard, not because I don't admire the process but because some part of me has made a bargain (with the devil) only to write poetry out of experiences that are so vivid and memorable that they keep coming back to me. For me the test of material for a poem is an image, an idea, an anecdote, a phrase, a metaphor, a dream that does keep coming back, until I am sure that it means something more than itself. This is my test of what I can make interesting enough to be that mythical Diane I want in the poems. One such dream that I had while at Hollins was like that, and I will recite it to you for what it's worth, as I haven't yet made a poem out of it.

I have had a number of dreams about poets and poetry. I am sure this is because I received a copy of a strange, fascinating collection of poems called Preferences by Richard Howard. What has interested me most in various bedtime readings has been the photographs by Tom Victor. The first night I was there I dreamed that Richard Howard and I were laughing and talking, as at a party, having a good time, and he kept saying what beautiful poetry I wrote. Now, Richard Howard and I are friends but he has never said to anyone, including me, that I write wonderful poetry. So that was obviously a dream in which someone else appeared disguised as Richard Howard. But a few nights later I had a dream that seemed like a more significant one to me since it involved a real event which has troubled me. Once I wrote to Elizabeth Bishop, a poet whose work I admired and, though I had never met her, I wrote to her saying that I needed some recommendations for a grant I was applying for and that if she had read my books and liked my work it would be a great favor to me if she would write a recommendation. I expected that if she hadn't read my books she would either ask for copies or ignore the letter. That if she had read my work and not thought much of it, she would also ignore the letter. Instead, she sent me a gracious letter saying, as a matter of fact, I wrote "the kind of poetry" that she had spent her whole life fighting against and therefore could not recommend me. Needless to say, I have never figured out what "kind of poetry" that is, nor do I really think she's ever read my work or she could simply say she didn't like my poems. That idea—that people dismiss a whole body of work without reading it—has haunted me for a long time. And this is the dream I had:

I dreamed I was outside of the house I was staying in at Hollins College—a white two-story frame house with a glass door. In the dream I was coming into the front glass door. It was a sunny day and you could see reflections on the glass. As I reached the door, I saw on the other side Elizabeth Bishop just as she appeared in Victor's photo in Preferences. She was signaling me to go away, even though I had a guest apartment in the building. I said I wanted to come in, and she told me I shouldn't come in because I stood for the kind of poetry she had spent her life fighting against. I said she was wrong. She didn't understand what she was saying. The light glared on the flat glass sheet of the door, and as the light got stronger, I could no longer see her reflection, only my own.

I woke up with the image of my face flattened in a glaring reflection on the glass, as if I were a photograph burned into the door.

That is the kind of dream I would make into a poem. I almost always start with an image, as when I wrote about Katherine Anne Porter's emeralds [after seeing them at a writer's conference].

Sometimes the image comes from someone else's poetry. I agree with Robert Duncan that in some way every good writer is derivative. Yet my ethics for writing poetry require disguising what you take. Along with Stevens and Lorca, Yeats has been a very important poet to me. And I think I wrote my first important or adult or non-student poem as a result of being deeply impressed with his poem "Leda and the Swan." About the same time I had read Mann's Holy Sinners and also been impressed with that book. I suppose the combination of reading the poem and the novel, and also taking a course in Greek tragedy about that time, made me very interested in incest, rape, sex which causes guilty feelings, taboos, etc. I will not include here a copy of the poem I wrote which is called "Justice Is Reason Enough," but let me say it is a short poem, autobiographical, about my twin brother, David, who committed suicide when we were still children after we had sex together. For years, people thought this was a true story, because when anyone asked, I averted my eyes, and said I didn't want to talk about it. Then later I let it be known that during that period of my life, I had a mental aberration and had really thought that the whole story was true, and that I had a brother. I believe (for here history is no longer terribly clear to me) that in writing that poem, I invented the whole thing but decided that in some mythic or psychic way, it was truer than my true history, part of which was boring and part of which I was ashamed of and felt I could never tell anyone. So I invented the emblematic experience. It is, I think, as much a part of my history now as whatever is real about my history. I can read lots of Freudian or Jungian interpretations into the poem now the male twin represents that part of me which could have functioned authoritatively in the world as men are privileged to do but which I myself killed, i.e. suicided, because I loved too much in a taboo way, as incest is taboo—and was forced to preserve the order of things in my own mind. The poem ends with the lines, "Justice is reason enough for anything ugly / It balances the beauty in the world."

For me, that poem represents the kind of content I insist on in poetry which shapes the poems, gives the formal dictates to my work. I must have a personal narrative because my poems are about my perceptions of the world. I must have an image which sticks in my mind, and in this poem, if you trouble to look it up, you will find the image of Yeats's raping swan, transposed into the shadow of a gull. And all of this is feeding into some means of talking about our lives as human. I spent many months before writing the poem sitting in a coffeehouse that students frequented (this was when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley), watching boys and girls as couples. I was alone. I was plagued with the feeling that I was not beautiful and yet equally plagued with the idea that physical beauty is an accident and not a virtue. About this time I began to discover dualistic philosophies like Zen Buddhism which posit that there is just the right amount of good in the world, since it balances the amount of evil. Looking at things in terms of balances began to create a morality for me, and this poem was the most passionate way I could think of describing it.

If you are interested in the written form of this poem you can notice that the first letters of each line of the poem (which is short) form the words, "He who once was my brother," which is part of the first line of the poem—"He who once was my brother, has died by his own hand / even now I see his thin form lying in the sand near the sheltered cliff / which he chose to die from." This acrostic was necessary because I was taking a writing workshop from Thorn Gunn who insisted that we have formal structures in our poem until Christmas, when we could write free verse. He taught me, inadvertently, that all poems need some arbitrary forms, even if you have to invent them. I remember that this poem won general approval in the workshop with one exception: I had left the "h" out of brother because I cut the line that began with "h" when I revised the poem. So much for formal objections. It also forced me to write very long lines to work my way around to descriptive and narrative statements which also had words beginning with the needed letters for an anagram.

The sestina is a form which has also appealed to me because when you make long and short lines it is also fun to juggle the ends, as well as the beginnings. As a young poet, I started by writing many sonnets. However, what led me to free verse and its more conceptual forms was the fact that I more and more rebelled against the even-length line. The even meter was not a narrative tool because the personal narrative has so much digression in it.

I would like to end with a short poem that continues my personal mythology and embodies part of what I have been trying to talk about. It is published in my collection, Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch, and it is called "Some Brilliant Sky."