On Intention and Intuition
Carl Phillips and Marjorie Lotfi in conversation
Carl Phillips, Marjorie Lotfi
Marjorie Lotfi: A few months ago, you raised the question of the role of intention versus that of intuition in writing poetry. When chairing Claudia Rankine at the Edinburgh Book Festival earlier this month, she was asked about the idea of solidarity and answered that she’d edited her latest book (Triage) with the intention of solidarity with a number of groups. This got me thinking about your question about intuition vs intention again.
For me, it’s a question of timing: intuition almost always comes before intention. I never set off intending to write something in particular (and if I do, I can be certain that’s not what will come), but more with a sense that if I start at a certain point, with an image or a moment that for some inarticulable reason I want to try describing, something interesting might come of it. Intention has to stay out of the way until later in the process.
How does it work for you?
Carl Phillips: You and I are in complete agreement here. I can’t write with an idea of where I’m going – in terms of subject matter or how the poem is eventually going to look on the page. In order to write at all, I have to get to a point of feeling lost, where I truly don’t know where I’m headed – which means that I’ve only got intuition to guide me, when it comes to which will be the next word, where the line will break, where the poem will end – the end, especially, has to be a surprise. Sometimes a line will come to me, and I’ll feel pretty sure that that’s how a future poem is going to end, but I still have no idea how I’m going to get there, no plan, except to trust intuition.
To me, Claudia is speaking less about the original writing of a piece, and more about revision – I think of editing as a form of revision. And revision does seem to be about intention – in Claudia’s case, she’s thinking about audience and shaping the work to accommodate audience in a particular way; that’s an intentional act. With my own poems, once I’ve let the dust settle and I can start to see what my intuitively-arrived-at poem is actually trying to say, revision is where I make the edits and tweaks whose intention is to allow the poem to speak both more clearly and – if only to my own inner ear – more pleasingly.
I think when we had our earlier conversation, I admitted, though, that even if I can’t write with intentions in mind ahead of time, I’m a little hypocritical when it comes to teaching, where I have often assigned some formal parameters for students – write a poem in ten lines, write a poem composed of two sentences, etc. – to get them started. While I myself don’t do this, I have found that it can help students, if they at least have some structural goals to achieve. It would be too confusing just to tell them to lose themselves for a few hours and see what happens!
So we are both team intuition, you and I. Do you feel this way when putting a book together as well?
ML: Your note about last lines surprised me; I can’t know where a poem is going – in language or otherwise – or I just can’t write it. I’m not sure whether that’s a lack of interest, or a sensation of hemming-in that closes my writing down. When I find a few words, or an image, or a memory that I sense I want to write about, it feels like a question rather than a resolution, and the writing alone takes me into that last line. Often – and I know this is slightly odd – it’s almost a physical sensation of knowing there’s a last line coming, my only job then being to keep writing until it appears. So team intuition, yes, but we start from different ends of the poem.
Intention comes later for me too, in terms of working to get out of the way of what the poem is trying to do, something I couldn’t possibly identify at the time of writing. Editing that initial work, maybe pushing the work into different forms on the page or trying out different line lengths can help me bring a later-identified intention sharper into focus. I’ll admit that I love this process.
(An aside: since your last message, I’ve been reflecting on a different kind of intention, which is less about the words themselves – or the subject/form of those words – and more about the drive, or instinct to write at all. Isn’t that a kind of broader intention? To make something unknown known, often something we didn’t even see or understand in ourselves? Is the trust required in writing – or perhaps in publishing that writing – also a kind of unnamed intention?)
As for putting a book together, this is particularly fresh topic for me, having just sent my second collection off to Neil Astley. I really struggled with ordering this book, not wanting to follow an obvious narrative arc. Eventually I read the poems randomly and found that they grew in possibility when placed after seemingly unconnected others. It’s almost like the poems have an invisible charge or orbit, and when put beside others, they open in unexpected ways. I also resisted the temptation to make poems more hard-hitting with their placement, which felt manipulative, but that’s a whole other conversation. So, as messy as it was, I ended up relying on intuition here, too. How are you using intention vs intuition in your many books, or is each book different? Do you ever set out to write a whole book of poems on a subject, or idea? Can you see that far ahead?
CP: That’s an interesting aside that you’ve raised. For me, when it comes to the instinct to write at all, it’s not related to intention or maybe not even to intuition; I think that’s a matter of sensibility, of how we’re each ‘wired.’ I don’t know what makes someone decide to pick up a guitar versus a paintbrush or a pen. But I also don’t know what makes most people never decide to try to hammer out meaning via art – though I’ll also add that art comes in many forms, the art of making a good meal, of raising a child, of simply having a good day…So, this is why I’ve never been able to answer when people have asked me how I find the trust to write, or the permission to write – it doesn’t occur to me not to write, even if I can’t predict when the writing will happen. I do think publishing is intentional, if only because one can’t be published without sending work into the world, and that requires actual decision-making, what to send, where to send it, etc.
I love your description of how you put your recent new collection together, probably because it exactly matches my own – ha! I have never been able to construct a book on a given subject – again, that would be like knowing what my poem will be about (and though I said I sometimes will hear a line and realize it will be the ending, that’s not often, and even when I know the line I still don’t know what poem will emerge that will contain that line, let alone what the poem will be about). I actually have a bit of impatience with books that are what they call project books, where the subject is all laid out ahead of time, because they often lack the surprise that I require in a poem and in a book of poems. I love reading a book of poems that feels as if the poems are surprising themselves by their own positioning or order, surprising themselves by their seemingly accidental resonances with one another. I love when the arrangement of poems in a book feels simultaneously accidental and inevitable – like love itself, I want to say…
As for themes and ideas, I think the poems announce those to me as I begin trying to bring them together for a book, but often I still won’t see how the poems cohere, yet I’ll trust the arrangement. Then later a reviewer weighs in and says the book is about memory, or desire, or loss – but isn’t any life ‘about’ those things. Each of my books has just been what I’ve built from and around my life in the most recent few years, and I think of the books, as a whole, as a sprawling idiosyncratic meditation on how one sensibility navigates this world within a physical body, how it feels for one human to be a human. It feels like wild luck or magic, that this could resonate with anyone else, but I’m grateful that it does!
I’m excited that you have another collection ready – I also have a new book, out next year. Do you feel comfortable talking about yours yet, about where intuition seems to have led you – what surprised you, where intuition led you?
ML: That’s a lovely question, Carl. Before I answer I want to note that your message made me think about the control we exert in the editing of poems themselves, or the ordering of a collection. This time round, I’m trying to give more space to (or show more confidence in) the reader, trust that they’ll find the connections they need to find on that reading. I love your idea that a broad theme is really just a mirroring of what any life is about, and an articulation of that writer’s experience of living. And yet so often it’s the resonances that move me in other people’s poems – I see something I think I recognize, and then learn something further, deeper, through engaging with the poem.
This second book of mine contains a lot of work around generations – being parented in difficult circumstances, parenting, now watching my parents grow older from afar. When I went to order the poems in that clear arc, I noticed that our early displacement out of Iran impacted all of the moments I’d written about in the poems, sometimes in small and unseen ways; the experience of leaving Iran and trying to re-create that home in other places has become a lens through which I experience and navigate the world. In the end, I went with the intuition that the reader should have an experience not dissimilar to my own in reading the book, which is to say the past is always present and often rears its head when I least expect it.
I’m excited about your next collection too and that we might get to hear those new poems in Galloway in 2027. How has this book differed – in the writing or compilation – from your previous books? Is your sense of intuition a well-oiled machine at this stage in your career?
CP: Thank you for that question. The most honest answer is that it’s almost as if, each time I put a new book together, I’m doing it for the first time – which I’m grateful for, since it means there’s never a moment when it feels routine, each time there’s a sense of adventure, with all the joy and fear that go with adventures. All I knew, when I went into assembling this book – called SIR, out this spring – is that the very tiny title poem would be at the exact center (I knew this the moment I’d finished writing it, just as I knew it would be the title poem), around which the other poems would constellate in equal parts – like wings to either side of a dragonfly, is what came to me, once I started sorting through the poems. But that was just a hunch, an intuition, and I had to feel my way through it and get lost, as I’ve always had to.
Meanwhile, I love what you’ve said here about the past being always present and rearing its head when you least expect it. I think that’s a perfect way to think of memory more generally, and maybe memory’s unpredictability is its own form of intuition. I also believe unpredictability doesn’t mean an absence of pattern so much as a gentle resistance to (or warning about the potentially interfering effects of) the imposition of pattern. When putting a collection together, I do want to think about the positioning of poems, how a given poem will land if it’s the first poem in a book, versus in the middle, versus at the end; but I also try to leave room for all the patterning that I’m not able to see yet, and often don’t see until long after a book’s publication, all the ways in which memory – including all the earlier versions of myself that I carry inside me all the time without being conscious of them – almost invisibly deploys and insists on itself, despite and alongside me. Which makes putting a book together, for me, the same as putting a poem together: a matter of trusting in memory’s intuition and my own, in equal measure.
Carl Phillips is the author most recently of Scattered Snows, to the North. A new collection, SIR, will appear from Carcanet in 2027.
Marjorie Lotfi is the author of The Wrong Person to Ask (Bloodaxe, 2024), which won the 2024 Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her next collection No Known God, is forthcoming from Bloodaxe Books in May of 2027.
