In the photograph I'm sitting in the center of the room, at a table piled with books and surrounded, on the floor, by books. The books may appear to be scattered, but they occupy a kind of priority, and are all about the same subject. I'm typing, elaborating a piece of long prose, book-length. The windows are flush with sunlight and the walls lined with bookshelves and Judith's drawings. There's a high daybed off to the left, just out of the picture, and a big radio in the upper right hand corner for listening to the news. I nap on the daybed listening to the news.

The whole space is about thinking and writing. We all put a premium on our space, our working space especially. And if you value a certain silence and freedom from distraction, where that working space is in relation to the larger space — the part of the city, the place in the country — matters. The outside — the literal outside and the spiritual outside — reflects an interior order, or disorder. The order of mind, the clarity of the heart. If you rearrange the room you work in you rearrange the space inside your head. If you close the curtains you cast a shadow. If you open the windows you invite the world. If you want a change of mind or heart, you might change venue — a place with a window blessed with a tulip poplar or a windowless window, if that's your taste, that confronts a wall.

Often enough we can't choose the space, though we can remake its order. What I mean is that the space we choose is a compromise, though how it's organized need not be. For me, there has to be order in order to think — order and silence, nothing louder than the rhythm and hum of the day. I need to hear my mind, through my mouth, work. I move my lips when I write. The desk, the table, I write at is in the middle of the room for who knows what psychic reasons. I find corners claustrophobic, which is why we used to make children stand in them, nose to the wall. It's a posture meant to shut down the system, close off the senses, darken the mind. I suppose there are people who could write in elevators. I'm not one of them. I find space comforting, distance reassuring. If I were a zillionaire, I'd live in a castle and operate out of the cozy centers of the spaces.

The windows here, though filled with light, do offer a sort of view: roughly suburban; that is, part cityscape, part tree-lined, part red-brick houses. I'm high enough I have to go to the windows to particularize the scene. Otherwise, I'm looking at the sky, the clouds, the distance, the weather. Places surprise you. When I lived in Houston, the landscape was in the sky, which was dynamic, always under revision. When I lived in Manhattan, I could never tell, by looking out the window, what kind of a day it was: gray, bright, or storm-impending. In one place you were completely exposed, in the other utterly contained. In Seattle, it didn't matter how the day looked to start out, because it could go, in moments, from light rain to sun to snow. It was a gray place, right to the soul. Where I live now the weather is soft; when it turns hard it's an event. These windows are, most days, an abstraction, views of the air.

Since writing is so much about closing your eyes, windows, anyway, are an afterthought. Beautiful views, vistas, lakes and mountains, are okay if you're a tourist, but to the working mind they tend to be a distraction, competition. It's best to turn your back in the presence of great landscapes; best to turn the chair around. Which is what I had to do one summer at Bellagio, where some of the most remarkable views of deep blue glacial lakes holding in place gorgeous green and pre-Alpine mountains exist. The air, the light, the gift of lightness itself were bad enough; the views, however, could eat your eyes if you looked too long. Worse, the little tower where I worked was called a veduta, meaning view in Italian. For the writer the view is always reflective, later, remembered, never now, but later, at the moment of actual contemplation, composition.

After awhile, whatever the view, the view becomes internal, and the mornings become more and more precious. Some of it may be the newness of the beginning of each day, some of it may be the quality of energy a fresh start gives you. You write and rewrite in the mornings as much as you can, in the midst of its sunlight and solitude, its dawn-early opportunities. You know that backing up against the sweetness of the mornings is the enormity of the afternoons, the elongation into the driftings and debts of time. Some writers seem to prefer the late day and the night. For me they are another form of claustrophobia, unless I read or look at the landscape. Naps help. But then waking, like a child, the day seems suddenly scrambled, out of sequence, confused, and it can take awhile to relocate yourself in the chronology.

Most work is social. I suspect that even those who labor singularly, who make their living at the computer, say, at home, know that only a few clicks away is a whole internet and e-mail galaxy of others just like them. A TV with a typewriter that talks back. Writing, though, at the computer or old-fashioned typewriter, is the opposite of social. It's a by-yourself business, you talking back to yourself. Long hours of this can leave you in a suspended state — very high or very low, depending on how the work went that day. If I may make a personal observation: writing prose has a different emotional weight from writing poetry. The effect, for me, is a difference in heaviness, as if the words themselves had, each, a specific gravity, and the more words the more weight. I'm speaking, of course, of body-count, not spiritual numbers. Writing poetry, however, is like levitation. The longer you sit there the lighter you become.

What is loosely referred to as writing style also contributes to these sensations. Corpulent Henry James, for example, writing his thorough prose; lean Ernest Hemingway writing those lean early stories. James wanted to write plays, Hemingway wanted to write poetry. Curiously, James eventually had to dictate his novels, from an armchair. And Hemingway, after an early career of writing in cafés, found it harder and harder to be alone with his prose, or with himself for that matter, and began to drink for longer hours than he wrote. He was often in the habit of standing or sitting naked at the typewriter. Poets, on the other hand, seem to have less trouble writing than living. Their poems tend to be their happiness.

The American Poetry Review

Editors:
Stephen Berg, David Bonanno, Arthur Vogelsang
Associate Editor:
Elizabeth Scanlon

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Poetry Daily / Amazon.com

Selected books available by Stanley Plumly:
Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000 — Paperback
Argument & Song: Sources & Silences in Poetry — Hardcover

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