The World Has Changed Read Online Free

anything. This is true of me, where poems are concerned. When I am happy (or neither happy nor sad), I write essays, short stories, and novels. Poems—even happy ones—emerge from an accumulation of sadness.
     
    J.O.: Can you describe the process of writing a poem? How do you know, for instance, when you have captured what you wanted to?
     
    A.W.: The writing of my poetry is never consciously planned, although I become aware that there are certain emotions I would like to explore. Perhaps my unconscious begins working on poems from these emotions long before I am aware of it. I have learned to wait patiently (sometimes refusing good lines, images, when they come to me, for fear they are not lasting), until a poem is ready to present itself— all of itself, if possible. I sometimes feel the urge to write poems way in advance of ever sitting down to write. There is a definite restlessness, a kind of feverish excitement that is tinged with dread. The dread is because after writing each batch of poems I am always convinced that I will never write poems again. I become aware that I am controlled by them, not the other way around. I put off writing as long as I can. Then I lock myself in my study, write lines and lines and lines, then put them away, underneath other papers, without looking at them for a long time. I am afraid that if I read
them too soon they will turn into trash; or worse, something so topical and transient as to have no meaning—not even to me—after a few weeks. (This is how my later poetry-writing differs from the way I wrote Once .) I also attempt, in this way, to guard against the human tendency to try to make poetry carry the weight of half-truths, of cleverness. I realize that while I am writing poetry, I am so high as to feel invisible, and in that condition it is possible to write anything.
     
    J.O.: What determines your interests as a writer? Are there preoccupations you have which you are not conscious of until you begin writing?
     
    A.W.: You ask about “preoccupations.” I am preoccupied with the spiritual survival, the survival whole , of my people. But beyond that, I am committed to exploring the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties, and the triumphs of black women. In The Third Life of Grange Copeland , ostensibly about a man and his son, it is the women and how they are treated that colors everything. In my new book In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women , thirteen women—mad, raging, loving, resentful, hateful, strong, ugly, weak, pitiful, and magnificent—try to live with the loyalty to black men that characterizes all of their lives. For me, black women are the most fascinating creations in the world.
    Next to them, I place the old people—male and female—who persist in their beauty in spite of everything. How do they do this, knowing what they do? Having lived what they have lived? It is a mystery, and so it lures me into their lives. My grandfather, at eighty-five, never been out of Georgia, looks at me with the glad eyes of a three-year-old. The pressures on his life have been unspeakable. How can he look at me in this way? “Your eyes are widely open flowers / Only their centers are darkly clenched / To conceal / Mysteries / That lure me to a keener blooming / Than I know / And promise a secret / I must have.” All of my “love poems” apply to old, young, man, woman, child, and growing things.
     
    J.O.: Your novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland , reaffirms an observation I have made about many novels: there is a pervasive optimism in these novels, an indomitable belief in the future and in man’s capacity for survival. I think that this is generally opposed to what one finds in the mainstream of American literature. One can cite Ahab, Gatsby, Jake Barnes, Young Goodman Brown.... You seem to be writing out of a
vision which conflicts with that of the culture around you. What I may be pointing out is that you do not seem to see the profound evil present in