DON MORRILL: Spend time with it. Don't be afraid to spend a lot of time just trying things out playing a lot, lots of no blame writing. It can be free writing if you want to do that, but other kinds of writing too.
You'll find your way to write, but spend time with it. Take notes, make sure that you have low stakes, shall we say low stakes writing. Don't succumb to the idea of masterpiece-itis. And if you have to write for a deadline, write for a deadline. But know that OK, you've had to turn something in, maybe it's an assignment, so you write for the deadline.
But you can always make more of what you've written later. There's always plenty of time to revise. First thought is often not best thought. You have to write your way often to your best work. I tell students frequently-- they complain, I say, cut those first 10 lines. And they say, why I love those. And I say that they're not as good as the rest and you had to write those 10 lines to get to the rest which is actually better.
So don't be afraid to do that. Don't be afraid to realize that you're writing 100 pages for two pages. You've been blessed with the two pages. It took the hundred pages to get the two pages. And other people do that too. Anyone who claims that it just comes out fully formed, is wrong, very rarely has that happened.
Shelley can write "Ozymandias" in 20 minutes, but he had been preparing to write that poem for 25 years. He knew Greek. He had read the classics. He knew his meters, too, so all of that was second nature to him.
Suddenly a subject was presented and-- it was an assignment actually-- and so he was prepared at that moment. But that happens rarely. Most of the time we bumble along, we find our way. And then it seems when you read the poem as though it's a moment's work.
Horace, great Roman poet, in his epistles talks about how he works his head off, as he even uses that phrase, works my head off, and just grinding his teeth to get those meters so they sound just so natural like they're just like water. And so that's one of the great paradoxes of art. It's a great labor to make it seem as though it's no labor at all.
And readers of poetry are the most unforgiving. You'll give a reader of fiction a few pages. A poet gets maybe one line, two lines. If they don't like it, they move on because there are great moments in poetry. And why would we want anything less than that?
We should be trying to write the greatest poems. But they're not written by gods. They're written by people who were once alive, those from the past who are as much as contingent as we are. And they didn't always know that they had written the immortal song or that they were going to be in the Norton Anthology or whatever anthology, Macmillan Anthology.
So that's my advice, write. Stay with it. The more you do it, the better you get.