"Bed, where are you flying to?"

"Bed, where are you flying to?" is the first line of Rita Dove's Sic Itur Ad Astra or This is the Way to the Stars.

Walt Harrington wrote an article called The Shape of Her Dreaming which was published in the Washington Post magazine about Rita Dove's creative process of poetry writing. Harrington literally sat with her throughout the whole process and asked her questions for each of the line she jotted down.

This journalism piece is unlike anything that I've ever read before. It's more of a narrative that takes a deeper look at an intensive creative writing process and dissects every single reasoning that presents itself in the poet's mind and heart. In his article, Harrington discusses the poet's rationale why she scratched off one line, revised two, or ripped off a few pages of what she had written. He was with her through her anxiety, her idealism, and her confidence.

I honestly never thought that one could come up with thousands and thousands of words about how a poem was written. But apparently Harrington did something different that made the piece so interesting simply by paying attention to details and asking questions.

Here's the excerpt of one of my favorite pages:
"I'm a child again." Too explanatory. The poem should have the feeling of childhood without needing to announce it.
"Catching my death of cold." It goes on too long. This poem must be a collage of fleeting images, as in a dream. But Rita likes the line and would like to find a way to keep it.
"Moonlight cool as peaches." She likes that line, too, may use it someday in another poem, but to mention food while in flight is too corporeal, too earthly. Still, she'll leave it in for now.

And Harrington went on and on with more lines to talk about.

Harrington must have asked Dove a lot of questions. I find this piece to be very evoking. Readers get to know Dove a lot better from this piece rather than Dove's own piece of poetry. Harrington revealed that he took notes and referred to the time every time she made changes and asked questions about items on her desk and pictures on her wall. A lot of things contributed to a successful translation of the crafty imagination that was going on in Rita's head to readers. Harrington's piece almost made the poetry so much more epic than the first time I read it. For me as a reader, it's almost like a globe-trotting journey to be with Rita all the way from the moment she picked up her pen and finally jotted the closing line. I gave Harrington kudos for coming up with such intimate narrative journalistic piece out of his intensive interface with the poet for a few days. It seems like not a single thing is minuscule to him. Every little component matters.