Jennifer Williams

And that list, that sense of a kind of list that's pushing you forward, driving you forward through the poem.

It's interesting, isn't it?

And these things, you know, they're like little...

they can be sort of wonderful.

I'm thinking of like the word worm, but that sounds horrible.

But you know those little bits of songs that go into your head and circle around and around and around, and you don't even know.

And sometimes I worry about that with poetry, that you write a line, and you think, oh, that's a great line, and then you wonder, I hope that's not something I write all the time.

I think I became so in love with it that I... I remember crying once reading one of her books because I just thought, this is so beautiful to me and I'll never be able to do this.

And then I think I found, not realizing it, that I went through a phase of... I could see myself writing in a manner, you know, a kind of echo of her... It's the sound of it, really, you know.

I could hear myself breaking lines almost in a Glyckian way or something.

And then it was...

I think then you, if you can sort of work through that and keep working with that, you can then hopefully still, yeah, it's like you've taken the best of that into yourself, but also combined it with your own voice to make it something new.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's so joyful, I think.

I mean, I've talked to poets a lot about this funny feeling when a poem comes very quickly.

that sometimes they seem to fall out almost whole, especially when they have those quick ones, you know, and it can feel almost like, have I done that?

You know, what it was telling me.

But I think the way you describe that seems very accurate to me, that it's actually, it seems very quick, but it's the accumulation of an enormous amount of

thinking and feeling that then suddenly, you know, pops out.

Pops out of the toaster.