Over the years, I’ve written poetry, novels, screenplays, nonfiction essays, literary criticism, and memoir. My two favorites are poetry and novels. I’ve never been able to choose between them. Poetry is beautiful, complex, and layered. Often my poems express spiritual intuitions and ask questions I can’t answer. Writing novels, on the other hand, is a slow, complicated, logical process that often seems as if it will never end.
The thing I like best about writing a poem is revising and revising until all the effort I have put into it becomes invisible, until the reader gets the impression that the poem somehow flowed effortlessly out of some secret source of inspiration. The Italians actually have a word for this technique: it’s called sprezzatura, the art of concealing art.
Part of my writing process is quite straightforward, and part of it is deeply mystical, visionary, and non-rational. First the straightforward part: I usually write five days a week for about five to six hours a day, starting around 9:00 am and ending around 2:00 pm. My ideal setting is a quiet room with nothing to distract me—no pictures on the wall, good light, a window or two that looks out on a tree, a green lawn, or a bit of the sky.
Then comes the intuitive, semi-mystical part: I lack words to describe what I do next, because when I begin to write a poem, I intentionally enter a reality where words don’t exist. So for lack of a better label let’s say that I go into a kind of “trance,” using a technique that I developed many decades ago. This technique allows me to come up with images, ideas, and metaphors. The fruit of these journeys is not poems, but simply the raw material for poems. As soon as I come out of this state of inner contemplation, I write out everything I can remember in in a series of special notebooks that no one is allowed to look at. I then rewrite and revise this material multiple times, cutting ruthlessly and leaving only the best, most interesting lines.
At this point, I transfer the emerging poem to my computer where I continue to revise it, exploring multiple possibilities. I fill out the poem with specific, concrete details and in the process create (and often cut) metaphors. I look for the rhythms, themes, and structures, and pay close attention to every detail. No word is unimportant. No comma is unimportant. I consider every line break, every space between words, every separation between stanzas. Each time I revise, I read the entire poem out loud. Then I cut and cut and cut until only the best is left.
My poem “Cold Snap” from my collection The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams is a good example of the advantages of ruthless revision. It started out as three pages of scribbled cursive in one of my notebooks. It ended up as three lines:
Cold Snap
dying is something you only do
once
you don’t have to get good at it
From The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, Marsh Hawk Press
After I finished cutting out all the rest, I sat back and looked at those three lines. I read them out loud half a dozen times and then read them again. Finally. I knew there was nothing more I could say, nothing I could do to make “Cold Snap” better. I knew the poem was complete, and that I had been right to cut out all the rest of those three pages of scribbled cursive.
Yet there is something more that I believe may be the key to how poems and other ideas come to me. Since I was six months old, I have occasionally run fevers approaching 107 degrees. I have written about these experiences extensively in my new Marsh Hawk Press Chapter One book Creativity: How Poems Begin, as well as in a brief, ten-page memoir entitled “Fevers and Jungles: On Becoming a Poet,” but the even shorter version is that, when my body temperature rises above 105 degrees, the real world becomes a thin veil, and I start to experience things that are hard to express in words. Poems and stories flow out of my mouth, but no one ever writes them down, because–correctly assuming that I am on the verge of dying–they are too occupied with trying to bring my fever down. In these fevered states I have sometimes spoken in rhymed couplets for as long as four hours at a time.
I’ve asked several neurologists about this, and none of them have had an explanation. However, recently I came across an interesting piece of information: when Saint Teresa of Avila had her first mystical visions, she was suffering from the high fevers of malaria. Recently, I have come to the conclusion that my extreme fevers have been more of a gift than a disability, giving me inspiration, ideas, and visions of worlds, which may, or may not, be real. The most interesting thing about these near-death fever experiences is that they are accompanied by a profound sense of joy and well-being which has made me at least a little less afraid of death.
Speaking of death, the three major themes of my poetry are love, death, and nature: the three great mysteries, which have been the principle themes of lyric poetry for thousands of years. In a recent review of my latest collection poems, The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, the reviewer said: If you allow yourself to see this collection as a metaphor, I would suggest it depicts a poet drawn to fire, to destruction, and to experiences so intense they force you to question your life, your priorities and your raison d’etre.” (Pank Magazine)
That’s not a bad summary, but it doesn’t touch all the bases. Besides love, death, and nature, one of my recurrent themes of that of the Earth as a great, living being. And then there is joy and laughter. I am fascinated by the way we sometimes can experience joy in the face of great danger. I think this may have been seared into my imagination by high fevers, particularly by the repeated experience of being poised on the threshold of death and feeling a calm, floating ecstasy which effortlessly transforms itself into poetry.
My poetry has been influenced by a wide range of poets, many of whom are mystical and visionary. These include St. John of the Cross, Mirabai, Pablo Neruda, William Blake, Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Verlaine, Walt Whitman, Jane Hirshfield, Osip Mandelstram, Federico Garcia Lorca, Saint Teresa, Basho, Allen Ginsberg, François Villon, D. Nurkse, and Emily Dickinson. My poems never involve simply playing with language. They aren’t crossword puzzles, or a collection of obscure references designed to intimidate the reader. I believe poetry can be powerful, accessible, complex, beautiful, and moving—all at the same time, much like the poetry of the poets who have influenced me.
My poetry has also been influenced by science. I did my doctoral dissertation on the Darwinian Revolution and the Nineteenth Century Novel, and before that, as an undergraduate, I worked in the Harvard Botanical Museum. I subscribe to Science and Nature and follow recent scientific developments closely. My interests are broad and inclusive: anthropology, archaeology, physics, biology, climatology, ecology, paleontology, botany, and more. At present, I’m particularly interested in the emotional, religious, and scientific implications of climate change, which I have known about for many decades, but which is becoming a more and more urgent problem as the years pass.
Right now, I’m in the process of writing a series of “prophetic” poems about the transformation of the Old Planet into the New Planet. These poems aren’t prophetic, of course, in any literal sense. I’m not trying to start a new religion. But if I can get them right, they will do what poems do best: avoid sermons and diatribes; enfold, seduce, and fascinate the reader with the beauty and terror of language; touch on reality without losing touch with surreality; and preserve ambiguity—because it is from the margins of ambiguity that not only poems, but all ideas are born.
Mary Mackey became a writer by running high fevers, tramping through tropical jungles, being swarmed by army ants, and reading. She is the author of 8 poetry collections, including Sugar Zone, winner of a PEN Award and The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, winner of a Women’s Spirituality Book Award from the California Institute of Integral Studies and the 2019 Eric Hoffer Award for Best Book Published by a Small Press. Her poetry has been praised by Wendell Berry, Jane Hirshfield, D. Nurkse, Al Young, Rafael Jesús González, and Maxine Hong Kingston for its beauty, precision, originality, and extraordinary range. She is also author of 14 novels including The New York Times bestseller A Grand Passion. Her new book Creativity: Where Poems Begin looks at the origins of inspiration, told in a way that encourages other writers to find their own unique path to the place where inspiration begins.