Jack Gilbert On Horseback Riding/Writing

From Jack Gilbert’s 2005 Interview with the Paris Review:

“If I’m writing well it comes to an end with an almost-audible click. When I started out I wouldn’t write a poem until I knew the first line and the last line and what it was about and what would make it a success. I was a tyrant and I was good at it. But the most important day in my career as a writer was when Linda said, Did you ever think of listening to your poems? And my poetry changed. I didn’t give up making precreated poetry, but you have to write a poem the way you ride a horse—you have to know what to do with it. You have to be in charge of a horse or it will eat all day—you’ll never get back to the barn. But if you tell the horse how to be a horse, if you force it, the horse will probably break a leg. The horse and rider have to be together.”

He also says that he won the Yale Younger Poet’s prize, “accidentally,” that he found cigarettes “boring” and that vacations are “second-rate.” Read the whole interview here.