Poems come to me in batches, like buses. You’d think that after all these years I
would have learned how to turn the taps of creativity to make them spread
themselves out like real work, like a job, a 9 to 5. Get up, write the poem, then get on with
other parts of your life. But poems are not really like that like
that. All too often they come in darts
and crashes with gaps as long as a country mile in between.
When I edited a literary magazine I regularly chased the
late Dannie Abse for a contribution. He
was from Cardiff originally and strode large on the UK literary stage. As a fan of Cardiff City football club he
regularly returned to the Welsh capital and was well disposed to what I was
trying to do with Second Aeon. He’d
suggest people I could ask, commented on the quality of what I’d already
included and generally enthused. But when
I asked him to contribute a poem of his own he always found some excuse for not
doing so. “I’ll send you some at the end
of the summer”. But he never did.
Eventually I cornered him at a launch at Lears bookshop at
the end of the Royal Arcade and he admitted that as poets go he was an
incredibly slow composer and simply didn’t produce enough new material. Demand always outstripped supply. “I’ll try”, he said. After the passage of what had to be a good
six months he finally gave me The One
Prayer, a poem about god and that perennial for poets, death. I included it in issue 16. Dannie Abse at last in there, in the company
of William Burroughs, John Ormond, William Wantling, Edwin Morgan and Pablo
Neruda. It was an eclectic mix.
I used to worry about my own output. Was I writing enough? Why hadn’t I manage a new piece this
week. In the days of the weekly
performance poetry explosions in Cardiff during the 1980s this need for a
regular supply of new material became acute.
The stage was such a critical place.
If you were on it with any regularity then reciting your greatest hits
simply wouldn’t hack it. Your audience
expected to be constantly entertained anew and not simply given reruns of stuff
they’d already heard.
I’d sit in my room banging hard the keyboard of my Alan
Sugar Amstrad for hour after hour in the
hope that something worthy would eventually emerge. Occasionally it did, too but what a stretch
of dross lay in between. The key is to
own an Ernest Hemingway built-in, shock-proof, shit-detector. Shove everything into it and expect most of
it never to re-emerge.
These days now that the world’s poetry fury has subsided and
to a degree I have less to prove I worry less.
If the page is blank and there’s nothing arriving to fill it then I move
on to something else.
Psychogeography. Essays about
music. Reviews of new books. Blogs about the NHS. Cleaning the car. Rebuilding that falling down wall.
There are plenty of techniques for making yourself write
when you don’t want to or don’t think that day you have anything significant to
say. They should be used with care. My view is that the world is now oversupplied
with poetry. Production has been on the
increase steadily since Victorian-era publishing for the masses brought verse
to the wider world. What we don’t need
this morning is yet another new volume that will languish on the bookshop shelves
unsold, unselling, unlooked at until stock check stock clearance consigns it
first to the bargain bin and then the pulpers.
Who reads this stuff? Admittedly more
now than did decades back but never enough for the bestsellers. Verse remains a Cinderella art.
How many digital copies of your latest book of shouting
poetry have actually been downloaded? Does your poetry-filled blog get consumed
by thousands of fans? Probably not. And while we are on the subject why does
everyone interested in poetry also seem to write it? I paint a dark picture. The poetry world is
often brighter than this.
If you are sitting there and want to poem to come but it
won’t you could try automatic writing. You
could cut up some great work and see where the joy of random discovery will
take you. Will the banging together of
words and phrases that previously never sat anywhere near each other now draw
fruit? If not then you could try
intertextuality, the taking of the work of another and using it as the base for
something of your own. The problem here is
ensuring that what eventually emerges is your own and not simply a retread. Many poets including some of the famous have
run foul dabbling here.
Failing everything then a walk in the stiff air and a look
at the shape of the clouds is often enough to set the spark flaring.
I sometimes revisit my earlier books, the ones that are more
than 20 years old and lost to me now back in the swirls of time and wonder how on
earth I ever composed like that. Did
those things happen? How did they? What motivated me? Was it all a fluke? How could I ever do this again? I puzzle.
I worry. Then after a while I
don’t. Instead I look out the window at
those clouds, still up there in glory, moving, not moving, full of colour, all
dark, all white.
