sometimes I think writing has nothing to do with me and that I shouldn't take credit for it. I feel that something comes from outside through me onto the typewritten paper. Often, I sit at the typewriter and compose stuff I didn't even know I knew. It happens all the time. It's not like I've decided what I'm going to write. (1977)

Once I've written something it does tend to run away from me. I don't seem to have any part of it - it's no longer my piece of writing.

clatter of a typewriter suggests that you're actually building something.

When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon.

It’s a typewriter,’ I say. ‘You use it to write angry letters to airport security.

While I'm writing, I'm far away;
and when I come back, I've gone.

I'm sitting in my office trying to squeeze a story from my head. It is that kind of morning when you feel like melting the typewriter into a bar of steel and clubbing yourself to death with it. (“Advance Notice”)

Oh, it was a problem with new stuff I was writing. I walked into practice and had re-recorded it and changed notes here and there for three or four songs that I had. It was stupid at the time. But he's, like, 'Hey, I changed the notes so I get writing credit.' And I'm, like, 'That's not how the songs go, though.' And 's like, 'It is now.' [Laughs] So I literally walked out and ghosted them. [Laughs] Later on, it was like, 'Hey, dude, you're out.'"

In the Village

III

Who has removed the typewriter from my desk,
so that I am a musician without his piano
with emptiness ahead as clear and grotesque
as another spring? My veins bud, and I am so
full of poems, a wastebasket of black wire.
The notes outside are visible; sparrows will
line antennae like staves, the way springs were,
but the roofs are cold and the great grey river
where a liner glides, huge as a winter hill,
moves imperceptibly like the accumulating
years. I have no reason to forgive her
for what I brought on myself. I am past hating,
past the longing for Italy where blowing snow
absolves and whitens a kneeling mountain range
outside Milan. Through glass, I am waiting
for the sound of a bird to unhinge the beginning
of spring, but my hands, my work, feel strange
without the rusty music of my machine. No words
for the Arctic liner moving down the Hudson, for the mange
of old snow moulting from the roofs. No poems. No birds.

My stories run up and bite me in the leg — I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

I have a habit of leaving places at the wrong time, just when something big may have happened for me.

(Could you describe your writing process?) Well, I explained it one time, on radio, as the sensation of being sick in your stomach, in that you suddenly have to throw up, suddenly, you have to vomit. There is no way you can stop it. It has to happen. It's a bodily process in which the material is expelling itself from your body. That's what it feels like to me in a mental or emotional way. Suddenly it's there and it has to be expelled. It's going to come out whether I want it to or not. If I don't have something to write on, it comes out of my mouth. It's got to come out one way or another.

If I let my fingers wander idly over the keys of a typewriter it might happen that my screed made an intelligible sentence. If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the British Museum. The chance of their doing so is decidedly more favourable than the chance of the molecules returning to one half of the vessel.

Unless I have something already moving through the mind, I don’t go to the typewriter at all. The world has so many poems in it, it has never seemed to me very smart to force one more upon the world. If there isn’t one there to write, you just leave it alone.

I sat before my typewriter and the great awful void descended, and I beat my head with my fists, put a pillow under my aching buttocks and made little noises of agony.