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“MCGOUGH: There are poets who believe that when a poem arrives you write it down, catch the moment, as it were, and then that is it. Whereas other poets revise and rework until something shines through. What is your method? PAUL: For me, how art works is I get a mood, a desire to do the thing, usually writing songs, but sometimes this passion to paint. The feeling has to be there. I do it for pleasure. I’m not a great one for, as Linda used to put it, “Beating myself with a wet noodle.” So with a poem, a line comes to me and I sort of doodle with it in my head. I can’t stop it. I realised the other day that the great thing about being a composer is that you are doing nothing. What a doss! I was recently on holiday in India, having a fabulous time doing nothing, and I wrote three songs that I’ve just recorded. It’s a lovely thing to be able to say in my profession, “I have to be doing nothing.” MCGOUGH: Do you use a computer? PAUL: Pencil and paper. I’m not a typist. Funnily enough, John became a red-hot typist towards the end of his life. He had always had this “Arts Correspondent in Kowloon” kind of dream. But for me it’s pencil and paper by the bed… those moments between falling asleep and just before waking are good. I’ve got this little book that Stelly [his daughter, Stella] gave me and it’s full of scribbles and drawings. MCGOUGH: Are you interested in poetic forms? Have you tried your hand at writing a villanelle or a sonnet? PAUL: I really haven’t got into structure yet, but I can see how it can be effective from reading other poets. Like a mantra. Allen [Ginsberg] always used to say, “First thought, best thought.” And I’d think, “Oh, brilliant.” But the joke is, of course, that Allen was always revising. I think he was the first person I showed my poetry to. He came over to the house in Sussex to ask me if I knew anybody who would accompany him on guitar at a gig he was doing at the Albert Hall. So I suggested Dave Gilmour and Dave Stewart and a few others. Then when he’d gone it dawned on me that he wanted me to do it, so I rang him and said OK. So we met up and I stuck a little Bo Diddley jinkity-jink behind his Ballad of the Skeletons, a really cool poem, and he introduced me to the audience as his accompanist. He loved to be the Don, did Allen, the controller, and I loved to give him that. Anyway we sat down with my poems and he knocked out all the “thes”, and any word ending in “-ing”. And I said, “Allen, you’re going to make me into a New York Beat poet, and it’s just not me.” In the end I thanked him for going over them, and it was good to have an annotated version in my drawer, The Ginsberg Variations, as I called them, but I wouldn’t be using them. It was a lovely process, though, and I should be so lucky.”
— Paul McCartney, interview w/ Roger McGough for the Telegraph. (March 10th, 2001)