Keith Ekiss is the Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University for 2007 to 2009. He is the recipient of scholarships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Petrified Forest National Park. His poems and translations have appeared in Bellingham Review, Gulf Coast, New England Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and The Christian Science Monitor.

How did you decide to become a poet?
I can’t remember a point when I decided to become a poet; I just decided to spend lots of time writing poetry, because I loved poems and I loved working with language. In the fall of 1999, I’d been out of graduate school for five years working full-time as a writer of manuals that explained how to use business software. It wasn’t the worst job, but I wanted to pursue my own writing, as an end in itself, without thinking about whether I was becoming a poet. I reduced my hours to part-time, and for the next six years, until I came to Stanford in 2005, I worked three days a week writing software manuals and four days a week writing and translating poetry. It was a great arrangement— enough money to live in an expensive city (San Francisco), and plenty of time to write. In 2005 I was fortunate enough to receive a Wallace Stegner fellowship and I haven’t written a nice word about computers ever since.

How often do you write and how do you motivate yourself?
I write frequently, though not every day. When I don’t have other responsibilities, I like to write for 3-4 hours in the morning. I think best in the morning and almost never write at night. Motivation is easy, and, in some ways, I was helped by years of working in Silicon Valley, when I really didn’t have a choice about whether I got up and sat a desk working all day. If I don’t feel like writing, I read the poetry of other writers until I sense a spark and can begin my own poem. Or, I’ll re-read my old drafts, looking for ways to revise.

How does teaching interact with your own poetry?
It often occurs to me when I’m writing that I’d better walk the talk. So when I tell students to cut the abstraction, write with vivid imagery, and revise to the heart of the poem, I’d better do it myself. Teaching helps me clarify what I value in poetry, which then leads back into my own efforts.

What poems are or have been important to you?
Different poems and poets have been important to me at different times. When I was an undergraduate, I loved the poems by Joy Harjo in her books She Had Some Horses and In Mad Love and War, poems like “New Orleans” and “Santa Fe.” She was the first poet I ever heard read when I was a freshman at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I’d lived in the Southwest most of my life, and it was important for me to hear about its history and landscape from the perspective of this Native American poet. “Yellow Glove” by Naomi Shihab Nye was a favorite—I’ve always liked poems about childhood, it’s an inexhaustible subject. “Under Stars” by Tess Gallagher was one of the first poems I ever memorized. Recently, an important poem to me that I frequently re-read is “Paean to Place” by Lorine Niedecker. It’s an autobiographical poem about her childhood in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin.

As you look back over older work, what changes do you notice in your poetry?
I hope that my poems have become more tightly crafted, and, as a result, more urgent. I’m a stickler for removing unnecessary articles, adjectives, and prepositional phrases that tend to slow down a poem. I like my poems to have rhythmic cadence, force and motion. I have a clearer sense than I used to of trying to make each line of poetry a good line and not just a few words that get me from point A to point B.

What is a typical writing process for you, from idea to completion?
My poems generally don’t come from preconceived ideas. A line or a phrase simply comes to mind, from observation or memory or thinking, and I go from there. When it’s going well, when I’m feeling a lot of energy behind the start of a poem, I like to work on it as much as I can while the emotion is new. However, I’m rarely able to finish a poem in a short period of time. After the initial drafts, I’ll return to a poem periodically over a long time, often years, making improvements or eventually deciding enough’s enough.

How can a writer know when a given poem they have created is “finished”?
This is a tough one. Can I say, “Next question!”? I work on my poems for a long time. It’s hard to know when a poem is done—sometimes you just can’t figure out how to make it better, or else you choose to put your energy toward poems that seem more promising. When a poem is “finished” does that mean it’s “perfect”? Probably not. My best advice is to keep starting new poems— your best work is ahead of you, and spend lots and lots of time revising your old poems, taking them to the next level as best you can.

What do you think is the role of an editor for a poet? Is it possible to self-edit or is it important to get another person’s perspective?
Very few poets have professional editors, in the way that prose writers have editors. But, poets do have friends and peers and readers who they trust. There are some poets, I imagine, who can work without feedback, but I’ve always found that smart readers are very important to helping me improve my work. They call me on my indulgences, on places where the poem becomes too private or where it lacks clarity or energy. You’d probably be amazed at how much published work out there has at least some element of collaboration behind it. Most poets don’t go at it wholly alone.

How do you think a student with a technical major can benefit from participating in a creative writing workshop?
“Poetry should be made by all,” said the French poet Lautreamont. I don’t think there’s any special benefit for technical majors in taking poetry classes. Poetry, like literature of any kind, or the arts, is just one of the good things in life. Everyone has something to say about their lives and the world they find around them. There’s poetry out there for everyone. I love it when students with a technical background bring their perspective to my writing classes— their attention to detail makes them some of the best poets.

What do you think a poem can do that other forms of writing cannot do?
That’s another tough question, and I can think of counter-arguments to any ideas that I propose. In general, poetry is more compressed that prose, less focused on story. But, there are plenty of poets who are wordier than Hemingway, and compression is a big part of micro-fiction and the short story. Also, poems can tell stories just like prose. If anything, poetry is able to more quickly shift gears and follow other ways of thinking and moving in the world than prose. Poetry strikes me as more provisional, more apt to contradict itself for the right music and not apologize about it. In a poem, you can write what you think and observe without any intermediary other than your own language.