I got fascinated with words when I read in grade school a biography of Noah Webster who was the first person to publish in the early 1800s the first dictionary of American English. I began reading dictionaries for fun. Each new word excited me. As I grow older, my interest in new words got, not surpisingly, more sophisticated, more nuanced. My goal was not to become pedantic--far from it. I collected words like other people collected stones or stamps or coins. Each new word I discovered had a different timbre, a different tone, a different color--one might say a subtly different chiaroscuro. When I began to feel poems welling up inside of me in my early 20s, literally writing themselves as they emerged into my consciousness, my job was to find a pen and piece of paper and "record" what was coming out of me. If I did not act immediately by "recording" this stream of words and phrases, I would lose that poem forever, for each of these poems was ephemeral and belonged to the Cosmos, not I. These processes are how my poems see the light of day and why they are precious to me--at once so powerful and so delicate. In the end, I find my unconscious in some mystical way finds the "precise" word to insert into the exact spot. Therefore, never force a poem into existence. Letting your inner-self create your poem effortlessly, for poetry is like making love: if you have to force either, stop.
Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks
A graduate of Andover and Columbia College, Columbia University, Tod Howard Hawks has been a poet, a novelist, and a human-rights advocate his entire adult life.
