Ashbery told the interviewer, apropos of titles, what a certain title of a book by the so opinionated and eccentric poet Laura Riding- one of those six poets he wrote about in Other Traditions - meant to him. Her title was Twenty Poems Less. To Ashbery, that meant twenty poems that she no longer had to write, twenty poems that she had gotten rid of. He went on to say, "That's the way I feel having written a new book. Twenty poems I don't have to worry about."
Russell Edson's problem in "New Prose about an Old Poem" was that he could not get rid of that poem that was not good enough to send out.
This "getting rid of" is the outcome of what begins as "something bothering you" that you have to "do something about." The thing occurs to you; the thing bothers you (pleasurably, though a little anxiously); you find a form for it that fits it perfectly - or rather, the material itself evolves into the form that suits it; you worry it, going through it again and again until nothing about it seems wrong; now you have done something about the thing that bothered you, and in doing that, you have gotten rid of it.
Nabokov said something similar: "Teachers of literature are apt to think up such problems as 'What is the author's purpose?' or, still worse, 'What is the guy trying to say?' Now, I happen to be the kind of author who in starting to work on a book has no other purpose than to get rid of that book."
— Lydia Davis, Into the Weeds