Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, William Walsh writes about The Poets from Erratum Press.

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge identified four kinds of readers: 

• The hourglass—everything they read runs in and then out.
• The sponge—gives out all the reading that it takes in, only a little dirtier.
• The jelly bag—retains only the refuse.
• The Golconda—runs everything through a sifter and keeps only the diamonds.

I am all four kinds of reader, and, I suppose, all four kinds of writer. 

The Poets is a novella in the form of a census. Pedro Ponce, one of its first readers, called it “a collective biography of all the poets in our midst—the famous, the infamous, the obscure, and the quotidian.” That’s it in a nutshell. 

I wrote the first draft of The Poets in about three weeks in early 2023. The original goal was to write a short piece of alternating sentences on poets and poems. I’ve been interested in a few current poets who seem to be writing in topic sentences exclusively. Over the years, I’ve read a lot of student essays that were composed entirely of topic sentences, and I don’t hate that approach. 

But alternating statements on poets and poems seemed a bit too ponderous, when all I wanted to do was make a few observations on poetry. So I cut all the lines about poems and focused only on the poets. All of the poets were fictional when I started writing, but I soon found myself alluding to personality statements from poems and songs. 

I wasn’t surprised to find myself blending lines from favorite poets and remembered poems. I’ve had a few book-length works of appropriation published: Questionstruck (Keyhole Press, 2009) collects all of the interrogative sentences from the books of Calvin Trillin; Unknown Arts (Keyhole Press, 2012) is a collection of poems, text pieces, and a silent play drawn from the works of James Joyce; and Forty-Five American Boys (Outpost19, 2016 and 2021) is a book of brief biographies on the childhood of every American President, drawn from over 300 sources. 

The Poets kept getting longer, and it was fun to work on. I dug through old notebooks for character descriptions that I’d never used in short stories, and I was happy to see that all of those unused characters of mine were poets. In revising the first draft, I organized the manuscript in a loose arc that follows the poets in their youth as they find a voice, through their undistributed middle years (babies, divorce, scandal), and finally into their old age as their focus turns to burnishing reputations, winning awards, and searching for a poetic demise. 

With The Poets, it was exciting for me to make something that was a hybrid text composed of my original ideas mixed with appropriated verses and lines from those capsule biographies that accompany poems in textbooks and anthologies. The allusions, by my count, represent about one-tenth of the book. Readers will recognize lines from Ashbery, Browning, Chang, Coleridge, Eliot, Frost, Hughes, Keats, Millay, Plath, Stein, Whitman, Wordsworth, to name but a few. Here’s two examples:

• A line appropriated from Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” paired with something from one of my old notebooks: The poet danced like she had diamonds at the meeting of her thighs. The poet had something she liked to call a goldmine between her legs. 

• Channeling Stephen Crane’s “In the Desert” for this: The lemon tart that the poet baked for dessert came out bitter, but she liked it because it was bitter and because it was her tart.

I submitted The Poets to Erratum Press because their mission statement spoke to me. “Erratum gathers books that confront the dead end of educated, literary culture, and deploys that culture against itself.” Fortunately for me, The Poets fit their aesthetic.  

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In addition to The Poets, William Walsh is the author of Forty-five American Boys (Outpost19), Questionstruck, Unknown Arts, Pathologies, StephenKing StephenKing, and Ampersand, Mass. (all from Keyhole Press), and Without Wax (Casperian Books).