As I mentioned in my other comment, I came here after someone finding a link to your review of our review by Luna Park. Then I click on the main page and see another mention of the new issue. Really appreciate the attention.

I really love the Hicok interview. More than any other poet I’ve known, I feel like we share the same kind of writing habits. I didn’t start writing until I was 20 or so, either, and like Bob, I never know where I’m going, just get into the right zone and go. Believe it or not I don’t have a copy of the issue here with me or I’d quote from it, but his process is my process, and it’s not the kind of thing most poets say, so it was very affirming to hear it coming from the mouth of one of my favorite poets.

And as a poet, Bob just amazes me. A friend of mine and I were joking the other day that it seems he has a perpetual stream of poetry running through his head 24/7, and just stops periodically to transcribe. With his newer stuff, there’s almost not beginning or end, and he makes such leaps within each poem that it’s like they’re all slices of one long opus. I don’t know if there’s another poet like him.

Tim

I probably write more crap now than I did then (in terms of percentage crap to material produced). I had so much to unleash in my 20s that much of it was good material. Now, I stretch myself to be compelling and I don’t know if it’s because what I tend to write is so familiar to me that it seems like it’s not fresh enough or if it truly isn’t fresh enough. Judging by reactions from others I’d say it’s likely the former, but one is usually not a very good judge of one’s own work. That’s why I tend to like workshops, but even then you run the risk of other workshoppers trying to rewrite your work the way they would write it and that’s not helpful either. On the whole, I think you have to learn your own tendencies and figure out what it takes to overcome them. It’s a lifelong process.

Writer’s block is an odd complaint. I believe, like depression, it manifests itself differently depending on who you are. I’ve suffered from it from time to time. To my mind writing is a product: if certain conditions are fulfilled then writing is produced, it is a natural result. There are times when my life was going through a bad patch when my mind wasn’t in a fit state to write anything.

I’ve been depressed and it’s different. I wrote the first drafts of my first two novels whilst depressed. Just now I’m stuck on my fifth novel. I haven’t written a word for months. I’ve thought about it constantly and I have learned that I have a very long gestation period so I’m not worried. I’ve written stories and poems and blogs (they count too) in between and I know I’ll come back to it with a fresh head in time. This happened with my third novel. I had a gap of two years between Part One and the rest of the book.