Nothing is Wasted: Poet Ellen Bass on Craft

Ellen Bass is gathering fresh acclaim for the poems of her collection Indigo (Copper Canyon 2020), but she is already well known as the prize-winning poet of Mules of Love (2002), The Human Line (2007), and Like a Beggar (2014). In The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Bruce Spang wrote that the title poem of the collection,“Indigo”, is “amazing [for] how adeptly she can swerve the poem in different directions, incorporating very wide-ranging emotional tones, yet manage to pull them together at the end.” Bass works at the top of her craft and leads conversations between poets, both roles she has earned well, beginning as co-editor with Florence Howe of the ground-breaking anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! (1973), which remains a monument of twentieth-century poetry by American women. She also is prolific in nonfiction, having co-authored The Courage to Heal (1988), the now-standard guide for survival, resilience, and hope for those who live in the aftermath of sexual abuse suffered as children. Bass is the recipient of Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, has received four Pushcart prizes, and is a chancellor emerita of the Academy of American Poets.  She has increased and extended her audience among poets with her brilliant and accessible “Living Room Craft Talks,” in which she discusses the craft of poetry with dozens of luminaries of contemporary poetry, including Ada Limón, Jericho Brown, Paul Tran, and Diane Suess. I attended her class on the Art of the Poetic Line, heard her read from Indigo, and later met for conversation in Los Angeles during the Antioch University MFA residency in December 2023. We expanded and continued our in-person conversation with a January virtual interview edited for Lunch Ticket.

Scott LaMascus: What led you to your present focus on craft? What are the consequences you’ve found in your own work regarding the types of conversations you’re having about craft with other accomplished poets?

Ellen Bass: Craft is what we use to make stronger poems—it’s the way we make these poems so they can enlarge and enrich our lives, open us up, and root us more deeply in our lives and in the world. If we just write in a journal or freewrite, it serves its own purpose, but I find what carries me further into the discovery is the actual making of the poem, the craft of the poem. That’s where I’m holding the experience of the idea, or the feeling at just the right distance so that I’m both in it and I also have some perspective. I’m finding the language and finding the music, the metaphor, the image that is right at the heart of what I’m trying to say. We’re always trying to say the unsayable. How can we shape this? How can we make this poem say what we can’t say if we just did a little synopsis of it? Craft is what that’s about.

It’s not astrophysics to think that if I want to write better poems, I should study how the poets who I admire have made their poems, learn from that, and apply it.

SL: You are saying that craft helps find the right distance, both in it and able to be aware of it. This sounds like the lesson of learning through other ways of writing. Are there any rough starts or false starts that help you find the poetry in a different way? What led you to such clarity about craft?

EB: Well, many years of wandering in the wilderness! I came of age in an era when there was a lot in the air regarding the idea that if you “just keep writing” you will write yourself into stronger poetry. Some of these teachings were good in that they countered what went before, which was too pinched in some ways. I think about Peter Elbow’s principle of writing without stopping or Anne Lamott’s teachings to just keep going and you’ll find your way. But I took those too far and believed that if I just kept writing, I would get better at writing. That’s not actually true. You also have to pay attention to how poems are put together and study poems you admire—pull them apart like a clock to see how they tick. Then try and imitate that in your own poetry, being conscious of what it is you’re actually trying to do with the various elements of the craft. It seems extremely obvious now to me. How could I have missed that? It’s not astrophysics to think that if I want to write better poems, I should study how the poets who I admire have made their poems, learn from that, and apply it. That’s about as simple as you can get. You can just about teach that to a five-year-old. But, I just kept writing, writing, writing. Whatever my strengths were, they remained, and all of my weaknesses, which were multitudinous, remained. I spent many years doing this. I knew I needed a mentor, but it was hard for me to find the right mentor. But I finally had the great good fortune to work with Dorianne Laux and she taught me many things, but I think the most basic thing she taught me was how to learn. So I began to acquire a skill set for poetry.

SL: Sometimes there can be such little patience for looking at another writer’s work and pulling it apart to understand how it is working. I had the good luck to be in an online COVID-era session with Victoria Chang and Matthew Zapruder. She was taking apart the poems of W.S. Merwin. She would have certain things marked in green or other parts with arrows leading back to another piece. I could see that some of the students were showing some signs of impatience, that this was going “too deep.” Why do you think some still think that going on in our own ways of working will teach us and how do we nurture the patience to learn in a deeper way? Did that deeper revision and learning come easily to you, or did you learn that over time?

EB: I don’t think it was patience or impatience for me. I think I was just dense.

SL: I doubt that.

And the great thing about poetry is that, if you save your drafts, you can never overwork a poem. You can always go back to the last time.

EB: I just didn’t get it. And I think this is true in many areas of life, that sometimes the most obvious things, we just don’t see. I think that’s what it was for me because I’ve never felt impatient. I mean, I tell people, poetry is not efficient. So if a student asks me, “Should I try A in this poem or should I try B?” I always say “Try them both!” And the great thing about poetry is that, if you save your drafts, you can never overwork a poem. You can always go back to the last time. I think it’s Kim Addonizio who talked about how sometimes students are trying to comb the hair of the cat to make the surface look good, but the cat is dead and they didn’t check first if the cat had a pulse. So if you overwork a poem and kill it, you can go back to the last time it had a pulse. If we were working in marble, I couldn’t say, “Oh, well, try this hand position for your statue and if you don’t like it, try another one.” Poets have the great advantage of getting to try anything.

SL: That is such freeing advice and resonates with my experience, too.

EB: I also have a motto that nothing is wasted. We work hard on revising, revising, revising, rewriting, and trying again. And some of those poems end up in the poem cemetery, but they are still preparing you for something that you don’t even know you’re going to write yet. There are times when I’ve been able to trace back and look at old journals, and I’ve been able to see, “Oh, my goodness, there’s an antecedent to a poem that I wrote fifteen years ago.” Sometimes there will even be an image or a metaphor that I wrote yesterday that I have no idea I had written down once before. And sometimes I can even look back and see the genealogy of a poem—all the failed poems that led to this poem that finally worked. So I think you need a lot of patience for many efforts and much failure. I think of that Oscar Wilde quote where he says something like, “I worked all morning and put a comma in, and all afternoon and took the comma out.” If you don’t have that kind of patience, I don’t know what you’d be doing except writing first drafts and doing a little quick fiddling and calling it good.

SL: Yes. I think that’s where I’ve been at times, too.

I also have a motto that nothing is wasted. We work hard on revising, revising, revising, rewriting, and trying again. And some of those poems end up in the poem cemetery, but they are still preparing you for something that you don’t even know you’re going to write yet.

EB: Maybe there are poets who can operate like that, but I don’t think there are very many of them. I know Billy Collins now says that he can pretty much write the poem and it’s going to take him about forty-five minutes. But he also says that when he sent out his first poetry manuscript, he got feedback from the editor in the form of the editor taking about a dozen of his poems and putting a paperclip on them and said, “If you can write more like this, send me the whole book.” And I’m pretty sure he’s said it took him 19 years. So did the poem he wrote today take 45 minutes or 19 years and 45 minutes?

SL: In your “Living Room Craft Talks” series, it must be wonderful to have these kinds of conversations with other poets. In fact, you’ve mentioned three poets already who have had an influence on your thinking. What are your observations about craft in these six conversations from this series?

EB: This series got started during the pandemic. My last book, Indigo, came out in March 2020, so like many writers, I was all set to go to AWP that year and all of a sudden there were a lot of emails, texts, and phone calls going back and forth among friends wondering if we should go or not. I wound up not going. So I had already put together a whole book tour and had a file folder for every event I was going to do and the dates and the transportation.

SL: What a painful loss of all that time!

EB: And all that was on the surface level. But like all of us, I was also thinking about whether I was going to live and were my loved ones going to live. And then we had a couple of family disasters and lost someone very close to us and it was just a terrible time. My wife and I started taking walks really early in the morning because at that time we were afraid to even walk near someone.

SL: Yes, we did that, too!

EB: We would get up around 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. and go out quick. And I remember exactly where we were when my wife said, “Why don’t you start teaching online?” I’d never wanted to teach online. Why not just be with people? And I also resist technology a bit. But she said there are a lot of places where people have the opportunity to participate in generative writing workshops, but outside of an MFA there aren’t many places where you can seriously study the craft. She said, “You love to do that, you’re really good at that,” and I said, “Oh, no, no, no. I can’t do it.” I pictured it like a TED talk where I would have to get everything polished beforehand and record multiple takes on it. She said, “Well, you don’t have to do it all formal like that. Just talk to people like they’re in your living room.” (Because I used to teach classes in my living room for decades and decades). And she said, “Call it Living Room Craft Talks.” And I said, “I can do that!” That’s very comfortable. And I don’t mind being recorded. That’s totally fine. I just need to know I’m talking to somebody and not trying to get it perfect. So if the chickens start to cluck or someone knocks at the door—whatever it is—that just has to be part of it. She said, “Great!” And on that walk we figured out there would be six sessions, two hours each, on Friday mornings, Pacific Time. She was like my Idea Man.

SL: You had it worked out by the time you were home from the walk?

EB: Yes, the whole thing. Of course, I already had craft talks I’d given in the past and so I could use those as the basis and that’s how I started the series. I’ve loved doing it. People really responded, and it was in the depths of the pandemic, so it was something meaningful for people, which helped. Then it went beyond that, and I started to do the second series that was entirely on revision. That was an extraordinary challenge because I’d only ever taught revision in relation to individual poems that students would bring and we’d look at that poem, talk about how they might revise it, and the other students in the workshop would learn and apply those principles to their own work. With the craft talks, I was going to be teaching it to a lot of people, so I couldn’t start looking at individual student’s poems. How was I going to teach revision in general and be specific?

And as you probably know, there’s not a great deal in books on revision. The poetic line, for example, everyone has written about. You can read a gazillion books about the line. But not everyone has written about revision with the exception of some drafts of some famous poems, like Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” Which many of us have looked through and it’s fascinating to see how she worked on it. But that’s different from revision examples from contemporary poets. I asked living poets if they would be willing to show me drafts of one of their own poems. So many poets were generous with this. And they talked us through how they made those decisions for revision. And I also showed drafts of my own poems, invited other poets to come into the conversation, and then started asking them to visit for longer times.

SL: Sounds wonderful!

EB: My wife says that on my tombstone should be written, “Overdo it, if you can!”

SL: I love it! What is next for the series?

EB: In Spring 2024, I started the sixth series, and we hosted an amazing lineup for the series, from Billy Collins to Nikky Finney to Arthur Sze, Patricia Smith, Maria Papova, and Carolyn Forché!

SL: Wow. Amazing guests!

EB: Yes. The poets I’ve asked to talk with us have been so generous.

Ellen Bass has earned a reputation as a master of poetic craft partly due to her own poems, but also for her disposition toward revision and willingness to help other poets move deeper into understanding the tools a poem uses to work its magic. Her online series of six seasons is available to watch at ellenbass.com.