Process, Patience, Revision (Repeat)

Poet Andy Gottlieb discusses his book Tales of a Distance, plus thoughts on chapbooks vs. full-length books, revision, and process

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Andrew C. Gottlieb about his book, Tales of a Distance, plus thoughts on chapbooks vs. full-length poetry books, approaches to revision, and the importance of patience. 

Andrew C. Gottlieb was born in Ontario, Canada, grew up in Massachusetts, and has lived on the West Coast of the United States since 1998. He studied writing, and taught composition and creative writing, at both Iowa State University and the University of Washington. Along with the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, he's been writer-in-residence in a number of wilderness locations, including three national parks: Denali, Everglades, and Isle Royale. He's also the author of the chapbooks Flow Variations (Finishing Line Press) and Halflives (New Michigan Press).

Watch the video below, or keep scrolling to read the interview in text. To hear Andrew read poems from Tales of a Distance, check out the video (I highly recommend it).

Essential Practices: Process, Patience, Revision (Repeat)

Radha Marcum: I'd love to start with a question I get from students quite often, which is: Should you try to publish a chapbook or a full full length book? You've done both. Aside from the difference in length, how do you think about these two choices in publishing?

Andrew Gottlieb: It's a great question. I love chapbooks. I think many poets do, because they're small. They're often gorgeously made. They're a great, smaller unit of poetry. They’re special because they're usually printed in smaller numbers. 

I think that a chapbook is a great thing to approach first, because you can make a chapbook with a smaller number of poems. As you're developing your work, you can see how it coheres. And you can have a chapbook with 10, or 15, or 20 poems, when you may not have the number of poems needed for a book yet. 

Putting a chapbook together forces you to think critically about your poems. And that's great practice before you're looking at a full book manuscript. As you know, it's a challenge to think about ordering poems. 

Radha: You alluded to this just now: The process is different for a chapbook versus a full-length book. How was your process different for Tales of a Distance? 

Andrew: It took much longer, and I had a lot to learn. It's harder to arrange 30, or 40, or 50 poems. I spent a lot of time laying out pages on the floor, taping them to the wall, and trying to get a visual look at the order. I changed the manuscript over years, as I would bring new poems to the table, poems that I felt were better than older poems. So I would take the original manuscript and strip out poems, add new poems. 

I did a lot of learning. I had to take rejections and think, What can I do better with my work? Why is the book not being taken by publishers? Is the book in the right order? Is it doing the work? Is it a book? All of these questions. The process of making a book engages you and inevitably makes you a better writer, as long as you're asking the right questions along the way.

Radha: Which questions did you ask yourself that catalyzed something new in your process?

Andrew: What are the themes? What are the ideas in the book? Have I collected things in the order to maybe tell a story or length the poems in a way? Always are the right poems in the book? 

There were poems I had in the first book manuscript that didn’t make it. There were more recent poems that I thought, I've learned so much now, and this poem feels more accomplished, and it belongs in the book. It fits in with these poems. 

Letting some of the work go is is always the challenge. But it can be a very organic process. It was in this case. I think one has to soften a little bit. You have to let yourself be open. Sometimes you think something's done, and it takes a little bit, but you soften and open up and go, Oh, this isn't ready, or I could do this better. Aha moments where you go, Boy, this poem, I thought this poem was perfect and done and just excellent. And you look at it and you think, Wait, it's just not right. Or it's in a style that is not “me" anymore. Something has to change. 

Being open is important, because then you're continuing to learn. Even before I submitted this book manuscript to the press that published it, I went through it again. I did some ruthless and surprising revisions to a few of the poems—poems that I had thought were perfect. You just have to keep doing that. That's, that's your job as a writer, right?

Radha: Can you tell us a little bit about the book’s themes, its “why”?

Andrew: What this book does is not necessarily to bring a person into the landscape, but to bring the landscape into us and have that landscape sort of work on the reader at a visceral level, through the region, through the imagery.

It's hard to avoid that feeling that the landscape takes you over. I was in Alaska in March, in winter. A lot of people try to visit Alaska in summer because it may be a little more accessible and the bears are out. But in the wintertime, it's all footprints and silence and it's really quite special. You feel a different time happening. There’s silence that sounds like a poem in itself. 

Radha: You mentioned that you took many years to develop this material that eventually came into this book. How many years did it take? Start to finish?

Andrew: When I was getting my MFA, with you at UW, I was studying fiction. I thought I was going to be a fiction writer. But I wrote poems all along the way. In 2008, I put together the first book manuscript, about eight years after grad school. So a while. And this book didn't get accepted until last year, 2021. I worked on it 12 to 13 years with time off. There were good chunks of time where I would stop submitting. Then I would go back to it, and I would do a whole reorder, and I'd look at new material. 

Patience is a much more valuable tool than any poet wants to be. But that's just the truth—you need patience with your work, continuing to ask oneself how can I improve. At first, I didn't want to have to think about that as much. I wanted the book to be ready quicker. The more I got into it, the more I realized the time it takes to revise, to let things get better, to focus on what I could do. 

Radha: So in the end, do you feel more satisfied with the work?

Andrew: Yeah, I do. But I wouldn't be surprised if I look at it a year or two from now and find things I want to change. You know, people talk about when a poem is done. And some folks have said, well, it’s done when it’s in a book. But I'm not even sure that's true. Writing is just something you'll continue to look at and go, Oh, I want to say this a little differently. 

Radha: Which sparks new work, which might be the next step.

Andrew: Absolutely. It's how we grow. Right?

Radha: How do poems evolve for you, typically?

Andrew: When you’re writing a poem, maybe about the wilderness, you realize you’re writing about marriage, or couple-hood, or that person you saw down the street doing something odd, but it has become wrapped into the landscape. And then you find yourself with a poem that says something different than what you thought you would write.

Radha: Yes, the inner and outer mirroring that happens through language. It’s amazing. So, I'm curious about your approach to revision. Maybe poems are never done. But how do you know when you're satisfied enough?

Andrew: That's such a good question. Right? It is hard to answer. I think you keep looking and asking that question. I take a poem and I read it, and read it again, and read it again. And I'm trying to read it as if someone else wrote it, maybe. Sometimes that means I have to put it on the shelf and not read it for three or four months and then come back to it. And there'll be a fresh spark. Something may jump out that can be erased, or something that you can add.  

You also learn to value revision more and more. For me, certainly, young, I wanted the first drafts be the right draft. Maybe everyone goes through that—we think the first thing we write is just magnificent. We know that's not true—maybe is never true. First drafts are great but only because you can shape them through revision, which is where magic happens.

Radha: Walk us through your process a little bit. I think it looks different for every one of us.

Andrew: I will line-break as I write, sometimes it’s arbitrary. You go with your gut, or with the breath, or with a phrasing. But those may become totally different line breaks later. One of my tendencies has been to have the last line of my poem be somewhere else in the poem. So I've always got that in my head. And sometimes others have pointed that out. Sometimes I catch it. But making sure the poem ends on a place that opens up or is something unique, not too much of a lockdown or concrete. 

I spend a lot of time thinking: Where does this end? And is it the right place? The same thing can happen at the beginning. What is the poem opening with? Is that the right image? Does it does it lead the right way? Sharing poems with other people to get their reaction is a great tool. It takes the process out of your head. 

I look for sloppy language, places where I've left in a cliche. I’ll adjust the rhyme a little bit if there's rhyme or make language a little more specific. Any place in a poem where I'm reading it over too quickly, that's something I'm taking for granted. Those are spots I go to revise.

Radha: That’s an interesting observation. As writers, if we do it long enough, we learn our habits, our tendencies toward laziness. It’s not, Oh, I'm a lazy writer. I'm not up to this task. It's more like your habits get in the way of that better language or the more true expression. 

Andrew: I think you just hit the nail on the head. Habits get in the way. And if you become alert to your brain and what your habits are, it can have so much impact on how you revise.

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Buy Tales of a Distance wherever you buy books. Learn more about Andrew’s work at andrewcgottlieb.com.

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