From the Archives - two unvaluable manuscripts

Compiling the Collected Poems is proving to be a more painstaking but nonetheless enjoyable job than one might have thought. Deciding which poems should be included is the least of it. A Word document can do anything you want it to, one only has to find out how.

I have the more recent booklets saved already so they can be pasted in but the earlier ones need typing in ahead of them. Having to do that puts those poems through a more rigorous qualifying process when one wonders if they're really worth it. One notices phrases or idioms one used long ago, some of which are still okay but some make one pause. Some poems get in on account of lines I'd like to preserve while others now seem a bit too forced or mangled but then, one thinks, heaven knows how stilted some of, say, The Sense of Movement now looks and it didn't do him any harm.

It's good to do because it seems worthwhile and since it's long been my main intention to please myself rather than any other reader it still does seem worthwhile. But it is by no means a clear cut decision as to what stays in and what is thrown out. As when editing a magazine, there are some obvious choices that go in uncontested and some less impressive efforts that are eased gently towards oblivion but there's the area somewhere below halfway in the order of preference where it all hangs on a close call, at least one of which was made having typed out five lines of it before I thought, 'no'.

Once I've compiled this large document and been through it time and again (but probably once or twice not enough), it remains to be seen how hard it is to make it into a kindle. Otherwise it'll be a pdf.

But, what about appendices. What about the 'juvenilia', what about acknowledgements. And what about a couple of original manuscripts, like these. 

I don't know if I still have any examples of the more chaotic drafts of poems that came less easily but these two, of Windy Miller and

Starý židovský Hřbitov, show how neatly poems can sometimes write themselves for you. That's all it took with them.

I find myself, whenever given the slightest opportunity, explaining that the most successful poems arrive fully formed and all you have to do is write them down. It's possible that one has to wait until one's ready before doing that and it can't be done at will.

But the very last thing we want here is a masterclass.

It might be decided that such esoteric archive material is more than such a lowly collection needs so here they are now anyway as I labour the point Keats made against working too hard, that If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.