I do need it to be relatively quiet when I'm writing--I know lots of writers who can listen to music or who like to go out into the world to write. I don't usually work well that way, and certainly not with music playing.
How do I know when it's done? The short answer to that is: I don't. At least, not always. Sometimes a poem just feels complete to me--like I've listened to all it had to tell me and tried to honor that. Other times (especially when I'm doing one of those poem-a-day challenges) I can't get enough perspective on a given poem for a while. Those are kind of nice in a way. They're little surprises, waiting for me in a folder on my laptop. I won't recognize the title, and sometimes I don't remember writing the poem. Those poems are like gifts.
Who has influenced your work? What inspires you to write? I think I have a different answer to this every time someone asks me. Thom Gunn is at the top of the list--I just don't think he gets read often enough, and I'm on a one-woman mission to see that people read him. Yeats, Neruda, Sylvia Plath, Agha Shahid Ali. I loved Donald Hall's book Without. Such an amazing collection of loss, that book. And I worked with some amazing poets in my MFA program. Jeffrey Harrison (speaking of loss, Incomplete Knowledge is astonishing in many ways), Theodore Deppe, Carol Moldaw. I'm also blessed to have a supportive and talented group of writer friends--both poets and fiction writers. Fiction writers make fabulous readers! I don't know what I'd do without them.
As for what inspires me...I don't usually think of it as inspiration, and it's a little embarrassing, but the one situation that's guaranteed to get me writing is catching myself saying (or thinking) that I can't do something. I can't write about that topic, I can't write in that form, I don't know how so-and-so pulls off this particular poem because I can't do that. As soon as I catch myself thinking that way, I have to go do it. Some of my favorite poems have come out of that particular stubborn streak.
Why poetry and not prose? Or do you write both? I write both, but I doubt anyone is ever going to see my fiction. I stumbled into taking poetry seriously. I took a creative writing class as an undergrad, and during the first meeting, the professor announced that there had been a mistake in the course catalog--the class wasn't mixed creative writing, it was poetry. A bunch of students got up and left. I stayed. It was probably part of that same ornery streak I was talking about before. And I was pretty good, so I kept writing. If I had ended up in a fiction class, maybe it would have gone the other way. When I was a kid, my writing was all fiction. When I was in high school, I wrote a lot of terrible poetry--really bad stuff. So I guess it really did come down to that course catalog typo.
That said, I still write fiction. I do it because I believe there are things that writers can learn from working in other genres. Fiction teaches pacing and characterization and plot and a whole bunch of other things. And patience, in a weird way--if I tried to write fiction the way I write poetry, revising and revising and revising in the early stages, I'd never get past the first paragraph. Fiction helps me keep moving, which is a good skill to have when I'm drafting a poem--it helps me get past that one word that's on the edge of my mind and just keep going. I can always come back, right? I'll often write a note to myself in parentheses so that I can just keep going. Sometimes it's a word that's not quite right but gives me the idea. Sometimes it's a whole separate tangent that I'll head out on later but don't want to address in the moment because I don't want to lose where I'm going right then.
But poetry...is there an art that pays more attention? Each word has so much potential, and each line break...I love line breaks. I love the poetic line, both in formal and in free verse. I don't know where else to find that. I can appreciate the attention, the detail, the choices made in other arts--I can watch certain actors all day, for example, just paying attention to the small choices they make. But I can't make those choices. I can look at a Rodin sculpture and appreciate the movement, the details, the choices he made. But I can't make those choices either. I just don't have those skills. I don't think of myself as particularly detail-oriented, but I suppose I am, when it comes to art. And poetry is a good fit for me in terms of that.
How long have you been writing? I wrote stories and plays and songs as a little kid, so I guess my whole life. I've been a poet since that class in college, so 14 or 15 years, I guess (I went to college in my 20s--I'm not as young as this makes me sound).
For you, what's the most important part of a poem? Wow. Which poem? That sounds flippant, but I think it's true. I think there are a lot of bad titles out there--titles that don't add anything, or that detract, or that muddy the waters of the poem. So there's that. But my favorite part of a given poem--the part that makes a specific poem work--is different from poem to poem, and sometimes from reading to reading. In Yeat's "When You Are Old," it's the line "But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you." I mean come on! Pilgrim soul? How am I supposed to not want a pilgrim soul and one man to love it? In Gunn, there's often a moment when I realize that he has once again written a poem in contradiction--a gorgeous poem about an ugly aspect of this human life, maybe. That realization is the most important part of Gunn for me, and somehow it stays true through subsequent readings. For my own work, the most important part of the poem is the point when I give it up, when I let it take me from where I might want it to go or from its initial impulse into whichever place it's going to end up. So the surprise maybe.
Now that I think of it, surprise is an aspect of everything I just talked about. The combination of surprise and inevitability--that's what I'm looking for in a poem, and the way that manifests (or doesn't) is often what makes or breaks a poem for me.
While I'm thinking about titles, Baron Wormser once told me that he doesn't tend to have trouble finding a title for a poem. If the poem is ready, the title takes care of itself. I think about that when I'm having trouble with a title, or if I'm unhappy with the title I'm using. I've come to the conclusion that he's right. A lot of writers start with titles, and if that's the case, this won't work for you. But I pretty much never start with a title.
Have you encountered resources or books on the craft of writing poems that have been especially valuable to you? Alan Shapiro's In Praise of the Impure: Poetry and the Ethical Imagination is great, especially the first section, which influenced me quite a bit. Ellen Bryant Voigt's The Flexible Lyric is dense but worth the work. Turco's The New Book of Forms is essential to me. And, while it's not about poetry, Truffault's series of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock says more about image and handling image than any other book I've ever read. Trust me on this one.
Besides writing, what other interests do you pursue? My husband and I have two former racing greyhounds. I'm in love with the breed--such sweet, gentle animals, and such goofballs. I love to cook, and feed my friends and family as often as they'll let me (which, for some of them, is pretty often). About a year ago, I started baking all of our bread--bagels, baguettes, English muffins, regular sandwich bread, basically anything with dough. We haven't ordered out for pizza in a year, and we're more than OK with that. And I love well-written crime fiction and dystopian novels. I don't get a lot of time to read for fun during the semester while I'm teaching, so I try to make up for that during the breaks. In my teaching life, I do a lot of work with international students--it's a very different way of creating meaning and defining the world, so I find that my teaching feeds my writing rather than distracting from it. Finally, I've got a thing for Hitchcock films, and find it close to impossible to pull myself away from a James Bond movie, except maybe for the ones with Timothy Dalton.
Ruth Foley serves as the Associate Poetry Editor at Cider Press Review:http://www.ciderpressreview.com/