The problem with my writing is that I write in pieces. The Black Notebooks took 25 years. And probably about 15 of those years were spent trying to piece it together to take the really important parts that absolutely were essential, but not repeating anything twice, to pare it down to the minimum. That took probably 15 years. And what I’m doing now is a little bit of both, both writing and paring down at the same time.

And you don’t approach something with a sense of urgency to complete it?
DERRICOTTE: Yes, I do. Rilke says, “Live the question,” you know. And I always thought he was talking about like never go into a poem thinking you know the end of it. You know, always be open-ended and move toward the mystery. But now I realize, he didn’t mean that about poetry. He meant live it. He meant live your life without the knowing the answer. And that is a very difficult mindset to keep. So every day I think I have an answer, and I think I know what I’m doing and I know it’s complete. But the next morning, I wake up and say, “Well, you got to do a little bit more here. You got to do– you haven’t quite gotten to the bottom of it. You haven’t finished. Your book isn’t over.”

And how do you know what format to write in, or when you are complete? When are you satisfied?
DERRICOTTE: It’s a weirdest thing in the world.

And do you ever come back from a point where you thought you were done…
DERRICOTTE: Oh, yes. Even when it’s out of my hands. Like when The Black Notebooks had been taken by Norton, and when Tender had been taken by Pitt, for Norton, I did an introduction that made the book an entirely different book. And in Tender, I arranged the poems entirely in a different way after the publisher had taken it and it was on its way to be printed. At the last second everything changed.

You have to have a cooperative editor to do that.
DERRICOTTE: Yes, exactly.

I saw an interview with Chuck Close, who has said that he has entered an gallery and filled in an area or two of his work even after its on exhibit. He never knows when he’s done sometimes.
DERRICOTTE: Yes. And, when does it become public domain, when it doesn’t belong to you anymore. I’ve done readings where people have come up and said, “You didn’t like the way– like it is in the book. You didn’t read it right.”

And well that’s a good point. And so if your work is in print, are there interpretations you can make of it? To change it?
DERRICOTTE: You know, I do, but in my experience after it’s in print, you shouldn’t change. But I do it. I hope to God that I don’t live long enough to spend my last ten years changing the poems I wrote when I was 30 years old. But some people do, and it’s always bad, I think. I’ve never seen it happen, well. It’s almost like they know so much and they make such a perfect poem, they kill it. I’ve seen that happen over and over again. So I hope I’m always working on stuff that’s still alive, to some extent, anyway.

The way you prepare to write, is it different than the way you might have prepared 10, 20 years ago?
DERRICOTTE: I say I learned to write by writing. I never know how to write, so that’s why I keep writing. And I really think that I know more now than I ever knew, but I think the poem Berryman by W.S. Merwin in which he asks the poet, Berryman, “How do you get a poem?” And Berryman says, “Every day you go kneel on your knees in the corner and you pray to the Muse for a poem.” He says, “I mean it literally.” And, he said, “Well, then if you do that and you get a poem, how do you know it’s good.” And Berryman says, “You never know if it’s good. If you have to be sure, don’t write.”

Is the way that you approach creative work different than it was years ago? Do you prepare in some way different? Do you have different techniques?
DERRICOTTE: I think that more and more I trust the present to be the thing that will hold the material to make the art. And I believe being open to what’s going on right now. My answer is about what I want to do, or my very alive questions are going to come from what happens right now. And so I’m very open– I’m trying to listen to myself.

What influences you today? How does it make it into your writings?
DERRICOTTE: That’s what I like about my prose right now, the first time I did this, I, think about three or four years ago, somebody asked me to write a piece about my mom’s death. And in maybe there or four weeks, I wrote this piece and it was a good piece. A few months later, I found out it was going to be in the Best American Essays of 2006. And it shocked the hell out of me, because it was so natural for me to write this. And it didn’t really feel like work, it felt like I was really simply writing down what my mind was thinking at these various stages. So it was a wonderful thing for me to see that this natural process that I was using with my mind, and my words, and whatever, that people appreciated this. And so that sort of opened me up to this prose in a way that was new. Quite naturally my mind seems to work this way, because as I said, I’m a piece maker. And so I’ll have a paragraph about a memory. I’ll have a paragraph about something that happened yesterday. I’ll have a paragraph about what you and I are talking about right now. And it’s almost as if my soma or whatever is organizing this for me as I’m writing it. It’s almost like it’s figuring out what it wants to do. And it’s doing that as things come to me. So I feel as if it’s really a miraculous kind of thing, you know.

What is going on in the world today that influences you?
DERRICOTTE: Well, a lot of times, it’s something that happens in the present. Like, right now I started writing recently about a neighbor and I having a disagreement. And me being a little bit more– what is the word– dramatic about setting a boundary than I usually am. Then that led me to think about why I haven’t set boundaries in the past and then I saw an article in The New York Times the next day about these young girls in, perhaps, Iraq, where their father sells them at nine into marriage, because that’s the only way they can get money.

And then this one girl protested and sued. And she was the first girl and nine years old. And now it’s becoming something that’s really being looked at about this culture and how they are treating these children. And so I wrote about that. And then I started writing about emotional experiences in my own childhood. So it is sort of making links. And then I started writing about my mother’s generation, and about a portrait of a woman in a historical book that I found and I had written this a long time ago and I found it, but it seemed to fit into this other piece. So that’s how it’s piecing these things together.

Do you find that these things resonate with each other?
DERRICOTTE: Yes. And I find that it’s so much more wonderful for me to be able to have sort of shed or divested myself of this hard determination to make a poem. And to– it seems like that whatever is– not to say I’m so happy that I fought so hard to make a poem. I know I have a lot of knowledge about how to do this that is currently of great use to me. But I think there is something about creating that is very natural. That, at some point, it is that creative force that is guiding you, and you’re not in control of it. But I think that you can choose to let it happen, or you can interfere with it.

Is there a subconscious for you?
DERRICOTTE: Yes, absolutely. I have said that consciousness is like a pimple on a whale’s ass. And I really believe that.

Do you listen and act on subconscious thoughts as they reveal themselves to you, or do you let things float?
DERRICOTTE: I depend on something that I don’t know anything about. I know that I wouldn’t be alive without it, and I know it’s been a tremendous force in everything that’s happened to me in my life. I also know it’s very scary and that sometimes I’m taking the blinders off for one instant. Maybe it’s like fear of being blinded by the light, or maybe it’s just that my little tiny pea brain, isn’t supposed to know so much really. It doesn’t have to.