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When
I was a boy growing up in Texas, I didn’t want to write,
but to ride horses and to fly. I came to poetry late, as a middle-aged
Air Force pilot. After some of my friends went off to Vietnam,
and one was shot down, then another, I felt a need to say something
to them, or about them. I could talk to their wives or widows–but
I turned to poems when nothing else worked; my first stumbling
attempts were like letters to the dead, or to someone unable to
hear.
When
my first book was published–mainly war poems–a friend
asked, "Where’s Texas in your poems?" I didn’t
know; I had never thought about it. But I started looking around
and, sure enough, I began to feel the call of that wild, native
West Texas which I knew better than I knew Iowa, better than Colorado,
better than Vietnam.
For
years, I had not considered this world to be my home. But when
I let down my bucket in a plains region doomed to dry up, I found
all sorts of images for poems, even if I could live to write for
forty years in that suddenly fabulous desert.
Like most other
writers I know, I prowl my own regions, and write from my
roots. By "region" I don’t mean simply geography–but
regions of the mind, a cluster of images or obsessions that
a writer draws on over and over, for poems. For several
years, Colorado was our Garden of Eden. But after the war,
my wife and I left it for the strangeness of flat Texas
plains where we had grown up–those hauntingly wide
horizons, the splendor of it all.
Every
poem is a metaphor of how it feels to someone to be alive at some
time, at some place. I didn’t write many poems before I came
back from Vietnam, so I may be wrong. But I think that’s
what poems become.
I
began in traditional meter, then spent years trying to muscle-up
the kinds of free verse I liked to read. In recent years, I’ve
worked about half-and-half on rhyme and unrhymed poems. In rhymed
poems, I’m trying to keep the strength and ease of free-verse
rhythms, although working often with traditional forms, also.
For me, rhythm is important, and clanging or soothing sounds–but
most of all, in a few syllables I need more than catalogs, more
than facts; I need to be stunned.
The
best poems yoke images together in unexpected ways–flints
struck together to make fire. Such discoveries are the delights
that a poem can give–a resonance that lingers, and that–in
the best poems–takes our breath away.
I
write out of a paradox of needs: the enormous hope of discovery
and the continual pleasures of play. I write for the pleasure
of playing with words and finding stories in poems. I write to
discover, to follow an image and see what story or poem I can
spin from it, what tale develop.
Writing
is always discovery–at least, that’s the only way I
can do it. I’m curious when I write, eager and willing to
find some splendid secrets, hoping to make some sense of what
I find–maybe something I’ve needed all my life, maybe
something so awful I wonder how I’ll ever deal with it.
Years
ago, a friend taught me to claim my regions, which are all I’ll
ever have of God’s plenty on this earth. So I write about
what I know, about what intrigues me–in many of my 2,000
poems about family, flying, my native West Texas and the Rocky
Mountains where Carol and I lived for years, and still, sometimes,
a war.
Accepting
Texas into my poems has been the best thing for me, as a writer.
This way of writing works, and so I’ll ride it the way I
would ride an only, ugly horse–as far as it will take me. 
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