Another example: I reprint in The Flexible Lyric a few of the crucial drafts of Bishop’s “One Art” — there’s no sense of any “conception” in the initial draft that I can find, although there is a great deal of linguistic play around some common and even clichéd notions about losing something. What focused it — or her — came early, with another sort of play, the development of the refrain lines for a villanelle. But I don’t see any “welling up” until the very last drafts, in the emotionally complex and really heartbreaking self-admission of the final stanza, as though elicited from the unsuspecting poet by the formal arrangement she herself created.

The great glory of poetry is that it requires — first from the poet, then from the reader — both sides of the brain, working in concert, the rational and the irrational parts, the modules that manage lexicon and those that manage dance.

But to repeat: there’s no right way for a poem to begin, or unfold. At some point in the process, the poet needs to look at the word choices, the rhythm, the images, the tone, the structure, all of it. When one does what — that is so much a matter of temperament, and may also change from poem to poem. It always feels like a mystery, and a gift — which is why we throw up our hands and call it inspiration. We don’t have sufficient access to our own brains to explain it any other way.

In reading The Art of Syntax, philosophical questions assert themselves, given that the book discusses how the mind conceptualizes and expresses language, i.e., in ‘chunks” or “fundaments,” in subject/verb patterns. Have your studies touched on why nature and the human mind seem to either make patterns or attempt to defy them? From what do you think patterns arise?

Those questions are interesting but way beyond my ability to answer them. In fact, I don’t know who can answer them yet — or even which field of inquiry they belong to. The discoveries of neuroscience have been astonishing, once there was the MRI and fMRI (functional scan) to look inside the skull and report on brain activity. But the knowledge is very partial and constantly being updated and may never be complete. It does seem, though, that what we think of as “intelligence” is a brain capacity to sort through huge amounts of data input, deciding what is important and what is not, and registering recurrence: in other words, discovering a pattern. Some of the pathology studies indicate that with damage to that facility, we simply get overwhelmed — Oliver Sachs is very readable on some of these cases, and there is now a learning disability described as insufficient “Executive Function.”

What has interested me — what I try to convey in the book — is the correspondence between a “normal” brain and the foundation of art — I draw on the parallel to music, but can you name any art that does not depend on pattern and variation?

As both writer and teacher, are there certain aspects in the development of a poet that seem true for most? How would you define your own progression as a writer?

I can’t think of any generalization that would be both accurate and useful — at least, none that would follow a fixed chronology. I was drawn to poems by a formal appetite, a love of pattern. Others may start with some particular subject matter. At some point, however, unless one is satisfied by an experience essentially cathartic or self-expressive, the one essential requirement may be reading and rereading and learning how to read great poems.