Adam Phillips: 'There is no creative process - I sit down and write'

Adam Phillips from The Guardian

Adam Phillips is a leading British psychoanalyst whose books of essays sport such intriguing titles as "On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored," "Monogamy" and "Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life," in which he posits that instead of mourning the life we could've lived, we get busy enjoying the life we have. His most recent book is "Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst." In an interview in the Paris Review last spring, Phillips talked about his writing schedule.

INTERVIEWER

You are very productive for someone who spends four days a week seeing patients and two days at home with his family. When and how do you write?

PHILLIPS

That’s easy to talk about, but difficult without either sounding precious or glib—because there is no creative process. I mean, I sit down and write. That is really what happens. I sit down in the morning on Wednesday and I write. And sometimes it doesn’t work and almost always it does work, and that’s it. Like everybody else, I sometimes have a problem starting, but it passes quickly. I sometimes get stuck and then I just abandon it. I don’t try. I’m not somebody who works hard at writing. I wouldn’t know how to do that. I wouldn’t know what to do, if you see what I mean. I just write until it runs out, and then I start again when I can do it again, but I do like to be able to do it regularly, simply because I love the experience of doing it.

-- From an Interview by Paul Holdengraber in the spring issue of The Paris Review

U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Wright: 'Nothing Prepares the Brain'

I have a document in my home computer that I've named "Brilliant Lines." These are lines of poetry

I've typed in from favorite collections on my shelves. When Davidson graduate Charles Wright

was named U.S. Poet Laureate last week, I opened that file and was not surprised to see

that almost half the "brilliant lines" are from his collections.

Wright majored in history at Davidson, and he's told interviewers over the years

that he wanted to write fiction in college -- his mother had dated one of William Faulkner's

brothers -- but Wright discovered he was likely the only Southerner who couldn't tell a story.

When Wright was in Italy, he happened on "The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound," and,

as he once told the Paris Review, "I discovered a form that seemed suited to my mental

and emotional inclinations—the lyric poem, a form, or subgenre, I guess, that didn’t depend

on a narrative structure, but on an imagistic one, an associational one. 'Gists

and piths,' as they say, instead of the intricacy of narrative a line."

Here are some lines of Wright's from my "Brilliant Lines" file: 

Nothing prepares the brain 

        for the heavy changes in the heart. 

Nothing prepares the soul for metaphor’s sleight-of-hand.

Nothing prepares the left hand -- luminous twin -- for the sins

    of the right. 

Nothing prepares the absence of pain for the presence of pain. 

Nothing prepares what is for what’s not. 

“Night Rider,” from the collection, “A Short History of the Shadow" 

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