The Writing Process

Talking to one of my poetry-related friends yesterday, she said she'll sit down to write a poem and stare at the blank wall in order to do so. It reminded me of another who previously said he would sit down at 9 a.m. and stay there until 12 and write, or work on, poems.

It's not for me to say it doesn't work like that because it clearly does for them. I admire both of their work. But it wouldn't work for me, it's unthinkable. I'd sit down and do nothing until it was time to stand up again. I wouldn't sit down until I had an idea of what I was going to write. And I wouldn't sit, either. I'd lie on the settee with a Parker pen and one of the many old envelopes saved for the purpose.

I did once, several years ago now, accidentally get caught up in a workshop. In this instance, each poet was invited to pick a postcard.  I think they then had to write down various things about the picture on their postcard and then those things were made into a poem in about twenty minutes, the specific details don't matter. I produced a couple of stanzas of iambic pentametric doggerel before hoping to get out of that nightmare but it seemed to work for others, the poems and the event itself were acclaimed as great successes and most people, it seemed, went home fulfilled, happy and feeling very creative. I'm not short of recurring nightmares so I never dream about that mild trauma.

Part of my point is that there are enough poems already in the world and continuing to be produced without the need of factories dedicated to making more in laboratory conditions. There might be more of a case for taking unfinished work for discussion with like-minded others in some sort of mutual assistance group but I can't face that, either. I no more want to share the delicate process of the composition of my poem with anybody else than I want to intrude on theirs. It's not that I regard it as cheating or that I want to protect my own process from industrial espionage but until I've realized what I want to do, I don't know either so nobody else is going to be able to help.

I've read a number of wise practitioners saying things like the poem is the thing you produce during the writing, not the thing you set out to do, that if you only end up with what you had to begin with then you haven't achieved anything and that what you discover in the making is the worthwhile bit, etc. That seems fine to me but it needs to be the poet that does it for themselves. The one thing that others can helpfully do for you is cross things out. My only viable workshop would be one from which everybody goes home with less than they arrived with and a few manuscripts with bad bits having lines put through them.

Monica Jones did suggest 'blazon' for Larkin's Arundel Tomb which, for me, strictly speaking makes that poem by Larkin ft. Monica Jones but it's not really about thinking of the words. They are all there in the dictionary, the thesaurus and on a Word document if you highlight the word, right click and select Synonyms. I found out about that at work once when reading my manager's annual assessment of me and said, ' you didn't think of that word, did you'. 'No',  he said, he had put in a not-so-good word and used his computer knowledge to find the better one which I knew wasn't naturally a part of his lexical range.

The making of a poem, if I have to be reluctantly prescriptive about such a wide and varied activity, is about something like the 'integrity' of the whole thing. For me it often involves waiting for a second idea to join with the first to create some kind of 'dynamic' but already I'm talking spurious nonsense. It's mainly in the rhythm and the 'music', please let's not say 'voice', the sort of thing that makes Seamus Heaney sound as naturally glorious as Mozart habitually does. And it's not about this word or that word but all the words put together to work in a way that make them worth returning to more than once.

I'm not convinced I'd like to be able to sit down to write a poem in the knowledge that some time later I'd have one. If no poem about 'pebbles' had occured to me I would happily have gone without but, luckily, as it happened, one did but there wouldn't have been a poem had it not been for the suggestion that we might write such a thing. So I'm glad of that because the poem below is one for any Selected there might be of my modest, frugal oeuvre. Such as it is.

But, for the most part, poems tell you when they need to be written rather than get written when you need to write one. Some of my favourite poets - Elizabeth Bishop, Larkin, Rosemary Tonks - didn't write many but didn't write many bad ones, either. A middleweight, or even quite slim, Collected is a sign of discrimination, in that valuable sense of the word that has been almost lost under the welter burden of all the bad discrimination it is associated with. That is not to say that some prolific poets weren't also very good but nobody, not even Shakespeare, not David Bowie and perhaps not even Bach, produced masterpieces all the time, and so it can't all be good.