Increas­ing­ly I feel that expla­na­tions of how a fic­tion aris­es are part of the fic­tion — that writ­ers nec­es­sar­i­ly tell them­selves a sto­ry about the ori­gin of a work because it helps the work get writ­ten, or helps inte­grate it into a nar­ra­tive that lets them move on to the next book. That said, part of why and how this nov­el orig­i­nat­ed feels clear to me. I’d just fin­ished my third book of poems and felt like I’d tem­porar­i­ly exhaust­ed my sense of the poet­ic line, that I want­ed a break from the par­tic­u­lar mad­den­ing chal­lenges and plea­sures of that form. Around the same time, I’d fin­ished a long aca­d­e­m­ic essay on the poems of John Ash­bery, a poet who fig­ures promi­nent­ly in my nov­el (I stole the title, Leav­ing the Atocha Sta­tion, from one of his poems). Many of the con­cerns that I’d pur­sued in my poems and essays — how one makes ver­bal art with a lan­guage sat­u­rat­ed by com­mer­cial­ism and mil­i­tarism, the dis­tance between what a poem aspires to do and what it can actu­al­ly do, how the flow of time can be cap­tured and inten­si­fied in a work of lit­er­a­ture, etc. — remained my obses­sions. I want­ed to take these ideas about poet­ry and the arts and place them in a life, watch them spread out into a character’s expe­ri­ence, track their effects once they were placed in a par­tic­u­lar body, mind, and time. One rea­son I love the nov­el — when I love it — as a genre is that it’s so absorp­tive; it can incor­po­rate poems, the lan­guage of crit­i­cism, his­tor­i­cal events, per­son­al dra­ma, etc. I think Leav­ing the Atocha Sta­tion came into being because at that par­tic­u­lar junc­ture the nov­el allowed me to assim­i­late all my dif­fer­ent lan­guages and con­cerns into an over­ar­ch­ing form. 

Actu­al­ly, I’m not sure I think that; I believed it when I wrote it, but now (a few days lat­er), I think even that gen­er­al descrip­tion exag­ger­ates the amount of con­scious con­trol I have over the direc­tion my writ­ing takes. As many writ­ers would prob­a­bly tell you, the form and con­tent of an art­work large­ly have to be dis­cov­ered in the act of com­po­si­tion; oth­er­wise, what’s the point? Maybe I should just say that one day I start­ed writ­ing — I’m not sure why — sen­tences whose syn­tax cap­tured the rhythm of this Adam Gor­don character’s think­ing. Even when I’d tried to write poems, all I could gen­er­ate were more of Gordon’s sen­tences. In some ways he’s an exag­ger­a­tion of my most unfor­tu­nate ten­den­cies, and in oth­er ways he’s entire­ly strange to me. The book that unfold­ed was as much an effect of his lan­guage con­trol­ling me as it was of my con­trol­ling his lan­guage. Tol­stoy once told an acquain­tance that he was hur­ry­ing home to see what Vron­sky would do next, indi­cat­ing, I think, how much a book devel­ops accord­ing to con­cerns out­side of autho­r­i­al con­trol. I sup­pose the nov­el itself is as close as I can get to an account of its gen­e­sis, describ­ing, as it ulti­mate­ly does, a young poet’s futile resis­tance to a novel’s demand to be written.